DREAMING DESIGNS

 

A bridge is a bridge one might say, but certainly not The Butterfly Bridge. It is indeed at first glance just like any other bridge, a pedestrian bridge that connects Christiansshavns Kanal and Trangraven. Until, it opens up to let the boats pass. It doesn't open up just like that. The bridge has three prongs and two are movable and the last two open up and when they do, its like two wings of a giant butterfly, as if getting ready to take flight! Simply spectacular.

It could be a serendipitous coincidence but I had just been reading Pico Iyer's Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells and it brought to mind Fukushima Roshi, the official Zen Master who confesses to five attachments even though Zen Masters are forbidden all attachments. The firsts, he says is Starbucks coffee lattes, the second chocolates and the third, a little bit spiritual idea in his own words: bridge. Yes, a bridge!

Unfortunately all my efforts at getting the picture of the bridge as it opened up gradually, spiritual or otherwise, went kaput. And whatever few does not do justice to the magnificence of it. So I am going with the pictures from the Internet with due acknowledgements

(www.designboom.com/architecture/dietmar-feichtinger-architectes-butterfly-bridge-copenhagen-04-20-2015/)



     (http://www.designcurial.com/news/pedestrian-bridge-design-copenhagen-4884854)

Dietmar Feichtinger Architects is the brain behind it. The firm won the competition to design the bridge, construction began in 2012 and three years later in 2015 it was opened. Just three years from planning to construction.  Its like the Danes and Design go together. Simple yet sleek and sophisticated, functional, simple and organic and so elegant. By now I guess design is wired into the Danish genes. They gave us the PH lamp and the Tivoli lamp (Poul Henningsen) and the ergonomic chair (Arne Jacobsen)  They know what  the core of design is and deliver it with quiet aplomb. No pshosha, just simple beauty that blows your brains away.  The 129 years Designmuseum Denmark does exactly what it claims to - 'to communicate the idea of quality within design.' It is here that the spirit of the 'grand old man of Danish furniture design', Kaare Klint, who furnished and designed the museum's inventory still resides. The collections ranges from furniture to silver, ceramics, fashion, textiles to digital design and according to the museum only a fraction of the collection is on display. Nature is clearly the inspiration for the creations. Sometimes, words fail miserably to communicate the stark but stunning beauty of some of the creative works. It happens within the museum, an almost day long visit is about experiencing. And about eye-openers, it definitely makes you look twice at each chair or piece of furniture you come across!  

 
 
 
 

 
 

Step outside, at the back of museum, and its a huge green courtyard with a cafe. Design communication especially chairs reawakened a strange correlation - the crashing of a chair on my head! But that's another story that's best left untold!

(In the picture the skiing slope is behind the smoking chimney!)

After the chairs, it was the stairs or precisely the cast iron staircase in the Hay House, the Danish design store that had me waxing eloquence.  The store on the second and third floor of an apartment in Copenhagen showcases the best of Danish designs for home. Laid out like an apartment, it  has everything a proud homeowner would covet. It's a wooden staircase that begins right at the centre of the living room on the second floor, goes up one flight and turns left for another to the third floor. What gives it the eye-catching factor is the balustrade or the railing. On the right hand side are evenly spaced out straight slim posts in red, with two smaller ones placed across, again evenly distanced, on each post that hold plexiglass squares in place. In sharp contrast on the left, instead of the posts are thick-ish tendrils that weave in and out gracefully. Hay house leaves one oohing and aahing and fervently wishing for a king's ransom to buy everything. 

Maybe its the always said pancake-flatness of the Danish capital that lets its architecture and buildings, a beautiful co-existence of old and modern to very modern, make such a statement. Strangely, the sleek modern structures bang next or at times abutting old historical buildings far from jarring create an interesting mosaic. Like the Royal Library more known as Black Diamond.  An extension of The Royal Library a historical brick structure, the waterfront very futuristic Black Diamond with its sleek almost mirror like black marble and dark glass exteriors can easily be believed to have one day heaved itself up from the depths of the waters. Quite close to Amager Bakke, is the Copenhagen Opera House, another architectural marvel. From the front, the building with unique roof almost appears to be gliding on the waters.  

There's another building which appears like two long rectangles joined by a row of square glass windows with two small triangle roofs. Sounds boring sure. What stops one in the tracks is the treatment of the walls, real trees with thin limbs and small leaves draped with a delicate lacy filigree. It certainly takes another level of creativity to think, plan and execute such an ingenious design.There is another building which has on its top what looks like a huge archway cutting through the middle and some construction work still going on. Look again - it's a clever but beautiful mural! Another brick building, a residential one, that could have been another faded brick most unimpressive rectangle with a triangular roof  but for the so simple yet so wondrous balconies.

 

  

Portable conical traffic dividers like stands, with bright orange square base and conical top, neatly lined up at equidistant posed some interesting questions with the simple option of a turnable circle on the top bearing just two options, a 'No' or a 'Yes'. The questions ranged from, 'Should the carbon footprints of an individual citizen be unknown to the government?' to 'The airspace in the cities should be free from airborne delivery drones?' to quirky ones like, 'People should be able to visit a shop and remain anonymous?' to ' People should be able to work without being tracked by sensors?' If I was associated in anyway with the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (KADK) and had to go there regularly, every free moment would have found me pondering the right answers at the Academy's huge courtyard's unusual posers, probably a temporary show. Even then I would have loved to check out every single question and add my two bit, but we had just met a lovely couple, friends of friends, who were to take us around the school of Architecture. In brief, The Danes plan, design and construct to be part of nature with prevailing natural elements beautifully blending  and not standing out as ugly eyesores.

After that it was the The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Acknowledged as one of the leading international museum of modern art and founded in 1958, it is a stunning piece of art itself! And it unfolds in a spectacular way: Walk in through the main entrance to be greeted by Henry Moore's 'Reclining Figure' and the seemingly simple looking structure with ivy covered walls, take in the museum's different floors and then walk out towards the rolling greens through the back doors and wham! All the senses get arrested  because the sight that spreads out is beyond description. Beyond the undulating greens, dotted with sculptures, lies a virtual Zen painting, the blues of the endless waters merging into the blues of the skies, both tinged with an almost mystic touch of grey.  It makes one realise that no human artistic endeavour can even capture a wee fraction of natural beauty. The whole ambiance is almost surreal - the all white front facade of the villa like museum, a tree by itself among the greens with unusual hues and elegant form almost dwarfing the outdoor works of arts, the  mix of old and new exhibits, the cafe and the waters and Sweden beyond.  

 

 

 

 

 

But why the name Louisiana in Copenhagen? I could almost hear the American drawl. Louisiana because of three ladies, all named  Louise. The house was built by one Alexander Brun who was married thrice and each time to a woman called- what else- but Louise! And when the museum founder Knud W Jensen brought the property, he retained the original name. 

 

After nearly the whole day  at the museum, I would have been happy to be an inconsequential permanent outdoor fixture in that vast landscape forever but for the under wears! Modern art is modern art, take it or lump it but to have an exhibit that involved clotheslines strung all over with undies of every shape and style flapping above was in plain terms, or rather my term that is, not my kind of art however profound a statement it was meant to convey. It was almost like the serpent in the garden of Eden.  If that calls for being labelled a philistine, so be it.