Please go ahead…

In Berlin you can walk through the houses. A global phenomenon I first really noticed when I had settled in the Berlin eastside for a brief moment.

There, whole blocks of 50's concrete buildings were wrapped in neoclassical coats tangent to the historicistic sandwich style – an immediate conflicting style experiment that led the district to look like a strange mixture of indeterminate backward-looking nostalgia and cool rationalism in communist power dimensions.

A recurrent feature of the socialist housing developments was the use of pillars, the simple ones. But unlike the model inspired by the Greek antiquity, that used the cloisters as façade wall, they were here used to create a passage through the houses. Rather than hiding the central axis, the pillars highlighted the building center by cutting a passageway through the body of the building and making a path across the huge residential areas in a kind stylistic anarchy away from the passive building facade.

Now, communist architecture has a way of spreading over land and the incredible heights and in contrast to the ideology of democracy to rise enthroned as an Emperor of the mob. And the huge building mass along Karl Marx Allee is no exception. But the even relatively large passages in the center of the buildings, gives the buildings a human proportional and gives a kind of opening against the residents. They create a flow and save the strollers a long detour along the rational scaled residential lots, making the cityscape more vibrant and dynamic than areas with square blocks surrounding a closed backyard as you find it all over Copenhagen.

Something on the other side
The difference between Friedrichshain and the Copenhagen backyards is that in Berlin the buildings are freestanding from each other differing from the block context, we see in this country. Walking through the building takes you to public parks and new roads to new places.

Several groups have recently, especially in Copenhagen, actioned for opening up the closed backyards to create a coherent structure of city life. But one thing is access to common areas and loopholes in the city. Another thing is demanding access to the backyards. The closed urban spaces in this country often have a limited size and is used to ventilate the kids in a safe environment, and forcing the courtyards open, I dare to foresee that residents will lose their enlarged parcel gardens and relative sense of safety, risking destroying the lives behind the facades.
A shortcut through a 100 m2 backyard in Vesterbro does not give quite as much sense as access to a 5000 m2 public park. Where you in Berlin can walk through, in Copenhagen you walk in.

Explore the cityscape
To find a better comparison to the communist social housing experiments than the old backyards, I took a stroll in Copenhagen's newest district, Ørestad. The new buldings here match the Berlin concrete blocks in scale – more or less - and much criticism of the new Copenhagen is precisely the lack of understanding of the human scale and comprehensible dimensions. Here there aren’t many holes in the buildings.

But, but no rule without exception, and BIGs latest addition to Ørestaden, the 8 House, is a fine demonstration of the Gehl-thesis of life among the houses. The 8-figure shaped building has been equipped with a passageway in the central axis, where the two bodies meet in the junction. The node will create a 9 meter wide life between the two blocks and act as a natural passage in the townscape - a passage between Ørestad and Fælleden, city and nature, and is also housing a large common area for the residents. Here you find the idea of breaking the body building creating life among the houses in the best humanist way, and I look forward to seeing the finished project in action.

Passageways in the city create surprises, and whether they are full of life or secrets is another question. But I will certainly encourage you to take advantage of the nearing spring and go and explore new corners and hide aways away from all the street rumpus.