On my last morning in Copenhagen I saw a young woman with long blond hair, in denim shorts and a fisherman’s sweater, bike slowly and serenely past stalled lanes of morning traffic. It was a perfect image, one that I’ll associate forever with the city and the country. But what image is there of the architecture?

In the same way that I think of red brick for Boston and limestone for Paris, I will think of glazed black ceramic roof tile for Denmark, where it’s used on many small residential buildings. On steep gable roofs the rows interlocking curved tiles, shaped like soda cans sliced in half, make a cool, enigmatic surface. Unlike similar Spanish-style terracotta tiles, the black ones don’t cast intricate shadows – they’re seamless. Against the simple, whitewashed volumes of the homes, both new and old, it’s a strikingly modern look. And when a such a building sits on a flat green lawn, with sunlight glinting off its roof, it’s an image of impossible refinement.

June 22, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Because of the reserves of time and skill invested in them, tapestries are inherently valuable. I’m told that in the Middle Ages they served as an important form of portable wealth. So that if a burgher’s house were on fire, he could take down his tapestries, roll them up, and make a run for it. But why make tapestries now, when we can print large-format images with hallucinogenic clarity?

To honor the Queen Margrethe’s 50th birthday in 1990, some Danes commissioned tapestries to wrap the walls of the Great Hall at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, where she receives heads of state. Based on drawings by artist Bjørn Nørgaard, who’s best-known for conceptual pieces and site sculpture, and executed by centuries-old guilds in France, they were woven by a team of thirty craftspeople over ten years and installed in 2001. In stark graphics reminiscent of woodblock prints, these seventeen panels tell the history of Denmark and the world. This panel depicts Margrethe, her consort, and their dogs. (While the Scandinavian countries are committed to socialist policy, they also care a great deal about their monarchs.) The panels have a fine, dense needlepoint-like finish and are rendered in eye-popping colors. While it’s possible to identify each character and scenario within the tapestries, what overwhelms is their dramatic and spatial intensity. Not one square inch of tapestry is left unoccupied; entire worlds are stuffed inside. It’s astounding that a tapestry project this ambitious was undertaken so recently, and that it achieves this level of virtuosity.

June 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Scandinavians are awfully cavalier about their treasures. The Munch canvases in Norway’s National Gallery are displayed near rooms with open windows. (More about the rooms, and the paintings, later.) The Danish crown jewels, on display in the basement of Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, a royal residence from the seventeenth century, are crowded in vitrines that tourists squeeze through and photograph without supervision. In any other country (which is to say, in the United States), pieces this precious would be secured with armed guards and bulletproof glass in a bunker.

While they’re appropriately dazzling, the Danish crown jewels aren’t as formidable as the English or as fairytale-wondrous as the Russian. By comparison they are, like the security, remarkably informal. What struck me most was how so many of the designs steer away from abstraction and incorporate flowers and figures. It gives them a fizzy, Pop-Art sensibility. There’s a charming chain strung with elephant charms, a small lion bowl, and several pieces with skulls in them. This seventeenth-century chalice has a porcelain skull with glittering stone eyes. It’s kooky and Gothic, and calls to mind both Hamlet and Damien Hirst. The official English-language museum text reassures us that the skull is a symbol of “eternity” rather than mortality. Graced with diamonds and emeralds and set in gold, with a dramatically flaring base, it possesses a seriousness that so much contemporary skull imagery, which adorns everything from oxford shirts to baby clothes, just doesn’t. It’s grave.

June 19, 2012 by Nalina Moses

One of my traveling companions remarked that Copenhagen was awfully nice, but that it looked as if they had put the same building everywhere. He’s right. There’s a uniformity to the old parts of the city, where all the blocks are built to a six- or seven-story height, with an identical, rather relentless pattern of high, wide windows lined up across long, flat facades. Yet the feeling isn’t banal: the buildings vary in detail, and are scaled so that they’re solid but not oppressive. The streets, open to the sky, are relaxed. The big windows let in daylight, a precious commodity in this part of the world, and their insistent rhythms measure one’s passage through the streets.

Of all the tasks an architect needs to contend with, crafting a compelling facade for a city building might be the most difficult. The street elevation is most often what shapes an image for the building and a character for the city. Copenhagen offers an important lesson in how simple a good facade can be: it’s just a wall with windows in it.

June 18, 2012 by Nalina Moses