DON'T TEAR IT DOWN

 

I know. This picture I took while walking home from work today, is ugly. Really ugly. Buttfuckingly (and not in a good way) ugly. In fact, I think it's one of the ugliest photos I've published on this blog (so far). 

However, there is a reason why I'm bothering your pretty blog-reading eyes with this. These houses have been remodelled, added to and re-used. In a not very charming way, but still. They're still standing there, proving that even a stupid food shop can be fitted into old buildings. 

You don't have to tear down old buildings that been built in an environmentally friendly and solid manner. You don't even have to tear down newer buildings that don't seem to work any more. Tearing down and rebuilding requires enormous amounts of energy, and produces extreme amounts of waste, and thus, you can almost always gain from redesigning an existing building on a site, pushing it around and squeezing something inappropriate into it. It's still better that it survives, perhaps secretly hoping of being restored one day.

MURDEROUS LIBRARY

 

I took this picture while I was on a boat trip in Copenhagen today. Why do I feel that the Black Diamond, the addition to the Danish National Library, designed by the Danish architects Schmidt Hammer Lassen, is sneaking out from behind a corner and wants to murder me? It looks so scary.

TREE HOUSE

Last week, I visited my friend Øyvind at his parents' house in Hurum. (They're moving to the village of Montségur in France this summer, but that's another story.) While we were walking along to the road to Holmsbu to buy some ice cream, we stumbled upon this wonderful tree house. I don't know who built it, but I bet my teachers would have loved it. I'd actually like to live in a house like this, perhaps just with taller ceilings and some insulation and windows. And a bathroom. And a kitchen, and maybe some space for a sofa. You get my point!

SMELLS LIKE ARCHITECTURE

A week ago, I was walking around by myself in Copenhagen, taking pictures of houses, walking into other people's backyards and smelling the roses, when I passed this door. Discovering that there was a window in it, I just had to lean really close and look through it, to find out what was on the other side.

 

As I was looking through the glass (in which you can see a reflection of my finger taking the picture, by the way), however, I noticed that the window was not only beautiful and solidly carved to the shape of a laurel wreath, it also had a very nice smell. I'm not sure what kind of wood this is, but it looks a bit like oak. It could also be pine, which smells very nice as well. 

Anyway, I decided to take these pictures so I wouldn't forget that architecture isn't just about images or giving your stuff a cool look. I think its different elements have to stimulate as many senses as possible, including doors that give away a lovely smell in the summer sunshine when you lean close to them.

MULTI-STOREY CAR PARK THAT DOESN'T RAPE ITS SURROUNDINGS

Can you the multi-storey car park? It's there, in the background, standing shoulder to shoulder with the yellow brick building. This friendly feature of downtown Bergen, located only a few meters from Bryggen is actually my favourite building of that kind, of course excepting the ones who are underground.

It's not the most beautiful or interesting building I've ever seen, but it blends very well into its surroundings. Usually, multi-storey car parks are like really ugly UFOs which have landed in the middle of the city, buildings without any relation to the environment around them, neither in size, materials or shape. In this way, they draw all the attention to themselves, without the quality of the design usually justifying that.

This building, however includes many features from the buildings around it, including the brick walls, the arched openings, the angle of the roof and the overall size. I don't know who the architect is, but I'd like to give him or her a hug.

PS. I'm sorry about the blog being in a kind of holiday mood, with not too many posts. I'll try to speed up, and I'll be back with lots of new stuff when year two of my time at BAS starts 1st September.