Copenhagen’s cultural facelift

Host City speaks to the some of the key figures behind the revolutionary new cultural buildings springing up in Copenhagen – including Matthew Smith, director of Buro Happold

Cultural buildings continue to flourish in the 1996 European Capital of Culture. Copenhagen, one of the world’s wealthiest cities, saw the Danish Design Centre open in 2000. The Opera House – one of the most ambitious architectural projects of recent years – opened in 2005, and a spectacular new playhouse, the Skuespilhuset, opened in February 2008. Next to open is the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s new multimedia house – a paradigm of sustainable architecture that incorporates a concert hall.

The design was influenced by the harbour’s legacy
of shipping. Photo: Lars Schmidt

"There are so many things going in Copenhagen building-wise. It’s quite unusual that you have so many new cultural buildings being built in a capital city," says Louise Pedersen, spokesperson for the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen, an umbrella organisation that encompasses the Royal Danish Ballet, the Royal Danish Opera and the Royal Danish Drama.

The primary home of the Royal Danish Ballet is the Old Stage – the original Royal Danish Theatre built in 1748 – where ballet is primarily performed, as well as some classical and baroque operas. The Opera House, which houses the Royal Danish Opera, is also used for large-scale ballets by later composers that require a larger orchestra, such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The Skuespilhuset theatre, situated on the opposite side of the harbour to the Opera House and almost next to the Royal Palace, is the new home of the Royal Danish Drama.

Building the Opera House
The cost of building the Opera House came from a private donation of around USD 0.5bn (GBP 0.25bn) from the wealthiest man in Denmark, Arnold Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller, who chose Denmark’s leading architect Henning Larssen to design the house.

UK-based consulting engineering firm Buro Happold was critical to realising Larssen’s ambition. Buro Happold worked with the architect in the earlier stages of engineering, while the construction stage was overseen by Danish engineering firm Ramboll.

Matthew Smith, director of Buro Happold and office director for Copenhagen, was project leader for the Opera House. "Working with Henning Larssen, we had lots of workshops, mostly in Copenhagen, and one or two in Glasgow, which was where I was based at the time," he says.

The Opera House’s chandeliers were created by
Olufur Eliasson of Iceland. Photo: Lars Schmidt

Copenhagen’s Opera House is a large, lavish and intricate structure. The whole house is around 41,000 sq m, with more than a thousand rooms. The building is almost entirely made of concrete – some of which is pre-cast, but most of which is in-situ – with a limestone outer shell. It also incorporates some steelwork – notably in the roof and the grid, requested by Moller, over the building’s glass facade. The building is opposite the Royal Palace, centrally aligned with the axis of the palace. Height was an important consideration in the design, as the intention was to keep it below the height of the Royal Palace. This design consideration drove quite a lot of the functions down into the basement. "Underneath the main auditorium you have an orchestra rehearsal room, which is a cavernous space that the public would never know about. That sits in a very big hole that was excavated adjacent to the harbour, which was technically quite challenging," Smith says.

The building incorporates rock anchors to set the structure in place. "These act like nails holding it down into the chalk to stop the structure floating away, because it is so deep into the water." The main stage is in the main auditorium, with room for up to 1700 people. A small second stage in an auditorium called the Takkelloftet holds a maximum of 200 people. The building also houses many rehearsal rooms, offices for administration, dressing rooms for the artists, for the opera singers and the chorus, for the ballet dancers.

Smith says: "The stage area is a huge machine of a place. If you look at a plan, the public auditorium – the part that most people visit – is quite a small part of the building. There are six stages: a main stage, a rear stage and two side stages. The intention is that you can move things around so you can have more than one performance actually set up at any one time. The area behind the scenes is much bigger than the auditorium itself; so there is a big machinery that is the guts of the place."

Cool sound
The largest rehearsal room is the orchestral rehearsal room. This is situated below the actual auditorium – five stories underground. Smith says: "Acoustically, it had to be completely separate to the auditorium. In principle, you could have an orchestra rehearsing down there at the same time as a performance in the auditorium." The rehearsal rooms are soundproofed using a "box-in-a-box" construction. "One box is the rehearsal room, which sits within a bigger box which supports the auditorium, and the two are acoustically isolated," Smith explains.

The studio theatre at the rear of the property also posed design challenges. The stage sits above the main loading bay for props and scenery coming into the back of the building. "Large lorries have to drive underneath it, so it’s kind of hanging from above, so it’s quite a complicated structure. There are big steel girders within the roof of the studio theatre and hangers that fix the floor and the foyer to the theatre," he says.

The auditorium is cooled by blowing air pre-cooled by the water in the harbour. "Another technical challenge was that, because it is a very high-performance acoustic space, you have to blow the air into the auditorium very slowly to avoid the noise of ducts. You need lots and lots of very big ducts so large volumes of air can move very slowly. Air is delivered under the seats and extracted at a high level. We modelled the environmental conditions in the auditorium quite extensively to keep people comfortable."

The environment in the auditorium was analysed using computational fluid dynamics, Smith says. "We did a lot of 3D structural analysis of the roof and of the auditorium. We had a full 3D structural model of the auditorium. The architects built a 1:1 model of a section of the façade, so there were some big physical models made as well."

Supporting the roof
The Opera House’s roof is a large structure, cantilevered to the order of 50m to the furthest corner, which is technically very challenging. And because of the height restrictions, keeping it as slim as possible was a key architectural intention.

Early designs looked at a number of different ways of building the roof, one of which was big trusses. "A preliminary model was built and put in a wind tunnel and proved to be not performing at all – it was vibrating and clearly not performing at all," Smith says. "So we went back to the drawing board and what you now have is a bit like an aeroplanes wing. It’s a completely plated up structure – so you have a top plate and a bottom plate and a series of wings internally, all steelwork."

Smith compares the structure of the roof to a plate girder bridge. "Some of the inspiration came from ships as well, because of Maersk. There was this contextualising idea to have echoes of ship-building; but also literally, this big roof was welded in a shipyard in Poland by one of the yards that Maersk used."

Building a new home for drama
Directly across the harbour from the Opera House sits another cultural and architectural highlight of Copenhagen: the Skuespilhuset theatre. At 20,000 sq m, and housing three auditoriums with a total capacity of 1,000, this new headquarters of the Royal Danish Drama is about half the size of the Opera House.

The total price of construction including acquisition of the site was USD 177m (GBP 90m). Construction took three years from the ceremonial cutting of the first sod in October 2004. The playhouse was designed by Lundgaard & Tranberg with input from consultant engineers COWI. Ramboll of Sweden acted as stage technology advisor for the project while acoustics advice was provided by Gade & Mortensen Akustik and UK firm Arup Acoustics. The general contractor for building the facility was E. Pihl & Son with construction management consultant Moe & Brodsgaard.

This unusual building complex was designed to protrude into the harbour to allow enough space for a well-functioning theatre. The stairway and elevator cores are located on the corners of the stage auditorium and were connected from a height of 20m upwards with reinforced concrete walls, which were concreted later.

To build these wall sections, stable and safe working platforms were needed on all sides. Multipurpose towers and multi-flex slab formwork from Peri were used to achieve this. Folding platforms, delivered completely pre-assembled to the construction site, proved to be the most economical solution for creating the formwork scaffolding.

A model of sustainable architecture
Until recently, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DBC)’s radio operations were located at 16 different addresses in Copenhagen. "They had a theory that they wanted to put all these buildings together in one 25,000 sq m complex. They wanted it to be sustainable, in the broad sense," says Thomas Scheel, architect and partner at Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects (VLA), who won the competition to design the masterplan for DR Byen, the multimedia complex that is the new DBC headquarters.

To realise its plans, VLA worked with consultant engineers Carl Bro. "We also designed some of the major studios, including the biggest project in the masterplan – the main studio for television and radio – as well as offices, archives and workshop," Scheel says.

DR Byen comprises four segments – four buildings with each its own characteristics. The four segments are linked together by an inner street and meeting place. Segment one, designed by VLA, contains three studio blocks, open and light editing rooms as well as production facilities and audience foyer. Separate architecture competitions were held for segments two, three and four to create a variety of architectural expression. The complex also includes a concert hall, designed by French architect Jean Nouvel.

The multimedia complex was built as one of the European Union’s IT ECO projects. The aim was to create a model building that demonstrates how to minimise the environmental impact of a modern IT-heavy office construction. This was achieved in large part by making the building very compact to reduce the distance between facilities and keep the costs of heating. "By using good insulation you don’t need heating, and you don’t want sunlight. All the big studios were put on the south facing side of the building to act as a sun shade, as they have no windows. The aim was to keep direct sunlight out of the complex as much as possible, because of the heat gain."

This idea of keeping heat out is motivated by the large amount of heat-emitting technology in the building and by the fact that cooling is a big energy consumer. The building also uses a groundwater cooling system, which sends water 100m underground to cool it.

The complex also uses as much natural ventilation as possible, facilitated by double facades. An auxiliary air conditioning system is available for when the external conditions are not suitable for natural ventilation.

A number of other measures have been taken to make the building sustainable. "We use rainwater to flush the toilet and there are solar cells on the roof. The complex is also completely free of PVC, as the drainage and insulation for all the cabling is made from biodegradable material," says Scheel.