Why history helps

From the perspective of cities around the world, one of the most encouraging aspects of Copenhagen’s transformation into the paragon of urban “liveability” is that changes in the city proceeded gradually. Residents were able to see the positive effects of previous changes and to modify their routines to react to new ones. In most cases, new development—sustainable new development—was integrated into the city’s historic fabric at a rate that the existing built environment could handle. In short, Copenhagen’s transformation has occurred organically, rather than being imposed from the top down through a radical master plan.

Copenhagen’s case proves that it is possible to create a model of urban sustainability from a centuries-old city in a manner that residents accept and even embrace. And so I think that this city’s story provides a reason for optimism among urban planners working with the existing built environment. But what about instances in which a master plan is required—for the development of a former industrial site, for example? Where can we look for a best-practice when a gradual transformation of an urban area is not possible?

Enter the widely acclaimed master plan for the development of the Carlsberg site in the southwest of Copenhagen. Designed by Entasis Architects, a relatively small Copenhagen-based firm that won Carlsberg’s international ideas competition for the site’s development, the plan aims to transform this former industrial area in extraordinary ways. Once home to the manufacturing facilities of Carlsberg Breweries, one of the world’s largest brewery groups, this 300,000-square meter (74-acre) site has the potential to become a model for future master planning efforts.

In so many ways, Entasis has planned the site exactly as today’s leading thinkers in the field of urban design would want. The district will be compact, characterized by a variety of users and a variety of functions. Development will be transit-oriented, with plans to renovate and even relocate the nearest train station and with provisions for plenty of bicyclists and pedestrians (planners anticipate a transportation modal split somewhere around one-third motor vehicles, one-third public transport, and one-third cyclists and pedestrians). Public gathering spots and other shared areas will abound, and the spaces between buildings will receive more attention than will the buildings themselves. But what I find particularly incredible about the Carlsberg project is the way in which planners have focused on finding the right balance between old and new, between preservation and progress. It is this concern for the intangible elements of the city—for the area’s charm and character, the sense of place, the poetry of the urban spaces—that makes this project a true “revolution” in master planning.

The Carlsberg planners seem to have recognized that history helps to make a city attractive, to create attachments between people and places. History is, after all, nothing more than a collection of stories, an injection of the human element into an otherwise inhuman landscape. And so Entasis has planned to preserve all of the area’s oldest buildings, replacing only the more recent construction. Most of the new buildings will share the scale of the existing ones, ranging from three stories at the highest part of the site to six stories at the lowest. The master plan provides for plenty of narrow streets, courtyards, and passageways between buildings. And the placement of new buildings will be based on the area’s old basement plan, an underground network that grew over time in unpredictable and irrational ways. Using the old basements to define new ground-level spaces will allow planners to create the complex system of nooks and crannies that gives an old city its charm. In a sense, the old basements will allow planners to predict unpredictability and to rationalize irrationality.

Ironically, many of the legal requirements intended to protect historic buildings, at least those “listed” or deemed “worthy of preservation” by Denmark’s Heritage Agency, have stood in the way of efforts to create this historic-seeming city plan. For one, authorities still debate about how close to a listed building it is permissible to construct a new one. Local government officials needed to be persuaded to allow the integration of old and new buildings on the Carlsberg site—exactly what creates the charm of, say, the city of Rome. So too with the narrow streets and passageways in the Carlsberg master plan: not until Entasis defined these areas as “shared spaces” rather than full-fledged roads was the master plan allowed to bypass the full sidewalk+bicycle lane+parking lane+motor vehicle lane infrastructure that characterizes Copenhagen’s newer streets. It was partially this ability to work around the constraints of modern zoning codes that made the Carlsberg plan so revolutionary.

At the same time as the Carlsberg district will work with historic city plans and its own historic buildings, the area will not—and should not, as the competition judges recognized—become “a museum.” New buildings will take inspiration from what makes Copenhagen’s historic city center so great, but their style will be contemporary. Working with a tradition that can be traced from the Roman coliseum to the Florentine Medici Palace and beyond, building use and design will vary by floor, with public spaces in the lower levels and private spaces in the higher ones. But the immediate inspiration for these variations between floors will come from buildings such as the Louis Vuitton building in New York City or Arne Jacobsen’s Stelling Building in Copenhagen, not ancient amphitheaters or Renaissance villas. Effort will be made to ensure that ground-level façades are as interesting as those on Copenhagen’s historic pedestrian streets, but again, the immediate inspiration for these façades will come from modern and contemporary structures. Nine slender high-rise towers will serve as a distinctively modern feature of the site, themselves irrational in their juxtaposition with smaller scale buildings. And all new houses will be listed as low-energy buildings, there has been some discussion about placing solar panels on the towers, and planners aim for the site to be CO2-neutral.

So the Carlsberg site will emulate the balance between old and new that arose organically in the central parts of Copenhagen, but will do so by suddenly and dramatically transforming a previously uninhabited area. In this sense, the Carlsberg site design can be placed in the same tradition as the verses of Shakespeare or the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright—art that is highly studied, carefully planned, and painstakingly executed but whose organic form gives the illusion that the work is far simpler than it actually is. At least in the planning phase, the product at Carlsberg is remarkable.

Signe Cold, an architect at Entasis who worked extensively on the Carlsberg project, told me that this site plan is revolutionary for finding new ways to translate historic urban designs into contemporary language. As I see it, creating a master plan like that of Carlsberg requires tremendous courage, for it means embracing arbitrariness, unpredictability, and irrationality—risky qualities that are perhaps even riskier when they have been fabricated by an urban designer. But while a perfectly “smooth and nice” urban district is a safer option, a city without the roughness of a historic area or the roughness of modern life will likely lack the magic of the Carlsberg plan. Now time will test whether roughness can be so expertly engineered.