Description

The church in Skovshoved, a small village in the vicinity of Copenhagen, stands in the fork of a junction between two roads and adjoins an expanse of green. The sizeable red brick building, whose nave measures 49 metres from the portal steps to the back of the apse, was designed by Alfred Brandt and dedicated in 1915. An annexe was added to the right of the entrance in 1930. A corner of land remained between the church and the extension which many decades later the parish decided to use for a further low, flat-roofed office and two chapels of rest. For the building’s plan, the architect chose a right angle with equidistant arms that intersects at its corner with two circles and closes off a portion of the previously open space to the west.

Together with the church, the previous extension and the new extension form a small courtyard. The building to the north contains spaces for the parish, the building to the south two smaller offices. The rooms with their horizontal windows all face the courtyard and are additionally lit from above by glazing in either three or four semicircular roof elements that span the roof. A corridor leads from the apse of the church past the offices to the corner of the building where two round chapels, with their matt black, metallic, double-wing doors, project into the corridor. These tiny chapels of rest – each with an interior diameter of no more than 4.4 metres – are entirely windowless; the only light is provided by a strip of white in the ceiling of the room. Such chapels, often found in towers, are a part of the tradition and typology of churches in rural Denmark and are used for holding a vigil for the deceased in the presence of the coffin.

The complex is based on the plan of a square, a fact that is evident despite the “disruption” to the perfection of the square caused by the intrusion of the cylindrical chapels. Moreover, it is based on a grid of seven by seven squares, whose dimensions are determined by the church and the earlier extension, a fact that becomes evident by looking at the floor of the courtyard and the arrangement of its walls, planting and pool. Their order is not purely for decoration, but inscribes the grid on the courtyard.

The architecture is introverted and the activities it houses turned inwards. Nevertheless, the old and new actively engage in a permanent dialogue, for instance through the monk bond of the brickwork – a repeating pattern of two stretchers and a header – or through the ambulatory with apse and arcade. It does not take an expert to recognise the pattern of the cloister with two chapels in Skovshoved. Here the assimilation of the Romanesque has taken place twice over: in 1915 the historicist approach of emulation and quotation; in 1985 the modernist approach of abstraction and reduction. The new addition, built right in the middle of a decade of postmodernism, establishes a connection with its history not through imitation but by creating a tension between continuity and transformation.

Arkitektur DK, no. 2/1987, pp. 60-

---

Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.