Soholm Housing Estate, Klampenborg, Copenhagen

Arne Jacobsen laid the foundations of his architecture in the 1920s and the 1930s but soon moved beyond the obvious features of the International Style towards an architecture of great formal restraint and material elegance, inspired by both the purity of the Danish vernacular tradition and the disciplines of modern industrial design.

It is sometimes forgotten that there is a line of minimalism which runs through Scandinavian architecture, making its appearance in Finnish modernism in figures such as Aulis Blomstedt or Kaija & Heikki Sirén (eg, their chapel at Otaniemi of 1957), and emerging in Danish terms within the oeuvre of Jacobsen, especially in his buildings of the 1950s, such as the Town Hall at Rqdovre (1955) or the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen of 1959. In these works the ‘lucid quietude ’ of Mies van der Rohe is given afresh interpretation which manages to employ standardized fabrication without falling into the trap of banal repetition...[+]