Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen
Trip Start
Aug 20, 2008
1
6
15
Trip End
Sep 15, 2008
Copenhagen,
Zealand,
Denmark
Saturday, August 30, 2008
COPENHAGEN
The following day we arrived in Copenhagen. Again the weather was perfect which may explain, in part, why I would say (at least at the moment) that Copenhagen is the most beautiful city I have ever visited. There are other reasons, though, than the weather. The consistency of the architecture is one. They have preserved the old buildings which are all of a height. New ones are built to the same proportions giving the city a unity lacking in many where the old and new are combined haphazardly.
Some of the city is built on landfilled marshes (much dating back centuries) and is interlaced with waterways. (As was St. Petersburg.) This allows for waterfront esplanades that encourage strolling and sidewalk cafes. The city's squares and esplanades (and some of the streets) are paved with Belgian block which while making walking a bit of a challenge in some places, but is certainly aesthetically pleasing,
We took a canal boat trip and the City showed off its waterfront face to us. From the boat we could see that Danes are not just into preserving the Old. They are world leaders in contemporary architecture and several spectacular new buildings like the opera house were built overlooking the river. Designed by the same architect (a Dane) who designed the Sydney Opera House, it is a similarly grand building that combines many design elements for a unique and spectacular structure. The guide told us that it cost over 2 billion kroner, or about $400
million to construct. We also passed a modern addition to their National Library, the "black diamond building."
The name comes from the fact that the structure is faced in dark glass with a 7 degree lean towards the water.
When the sun reflects off the water and onto the building, from our viewpoint on the water, it looked like hundreds of diamonds flashing from the building's façade.
After the boat tour, we visited the Danish Architecture Center and viewed an exhibit on "Building Sustainable Communities," a collaboration of the United Nations Global Compact and Danish architectural firms. It showcased the many innovative architectural projects being built all over the world in collaboration with Danish architects. Projects ranged from floating school classrooms in south Asia that traveled up the river with the farm laborers as they moved according to the needs of the harvest, to a mega billions financial center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia that incorporated a monorail connecting the buildings and solar energy for cooling. There were projects in places as small as Nuuk, Greenland and as large as Shanghai, China. All tried to incorporate elements of beauty, community, and sustainability. The United States was nowhere to be found among the many projects and sadly, we had the sense that the world is passing us by. (Seven years after 9/11, Ground Zero remains stalled.) Is the War in Iraq costing us our own development?
