Hornbaekhaus The Functional Traditional

Part Elevation Photo from Drawing Matter

(Hornbaekhaus) was built in 1923 and designed by the Architect Kay Fisker. It was built for a cooperative housing association with government support and is pretty big taking up a large urban block in Copenhagen all by itself. It’s longest facade is about 180m long, and there are about 290 apartments in the block the average size of them being 70m².

Exterior elevations are in red brick, interior ones around the courtyard are in yellow brick. The pitched roof is of red clay tiles so the materials are all quite traditional.

Kay Fisker, Typical floor plan, Hornbækhus, 1920. The Danish National Art Library.

The windows in the elevations are absolutely consistent and although the apartments vary in size and layout behind them there is no way to see this from the outside. The layout of the chimneys on the roof also is unchanging as are the stairs which are centred over the entrance doors so again there is a consistency to the layout that is almost unnerving. This is a monumental and imposing composition which is only magnified by it’s stark and ubiquitous window repetition. There is a tension between the ultra rational of what we see and the interior life of the building which here is tangible. Building Module

At first sight the building maybe gives some mixed messages, its super rational but made with traditional materials and a pitched roof. It has detailing that is classical and some that is not.

It certainly feels like it might owe something to the modernist style that was just taking hold throughout Europe at this time but it equally has something of the neo-classical . Looking more closely you can see that it’s not really a neo-classical building much at all much more functionalist and modernist. Take for example the detailing of the window the outer frames are painted black in contrast with the inner frames and they serve to virtually float the windows a little separate from the walls. This doesn’t seem like a classical detail it’s just too abstract. In fact dentil frieze cornices and quoins are the only clearly classical architectural elements in the facade.¹

Photographer: Sandra Gonon Arkitekturbilleder.

In this building the classical details are already a bit like quotations. This inbetween-ness, a modernness that was also different from the International Style is what Fisker himself and many others commented on. It meant that it was an odd one out and didn’t fit either modernism or reactionary neo-classical design framing. Quoting Soberg;

Fisker’s non-dogmatic and acculturated approach towards the Modern Movement, which he labelled ‘the functional traditional’, has made it difficult for historians to situate him within broader international developments.- page xi ²

This is somewhat true and odd at the same same time. There were at the time many in-between projects and architects doing things in a different way. Modernism was called Functionalism until Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock took a much curated slice of the burgeoning styles and rechristened them the International Style in 1932.³ This was the start of the kind of self-conscious honing of a style of the modern that tended to leave out many really interesting buildings like the Hornbaekhaus.

Kay Fisker, short elevation, Hornbækhus, Hornbækgade. The Danish National Art Library.

Other in-between buildings I’ve written about include The Shell Building by JJP Oud, or anything by Fernand Pouillon, even the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna ended up out of the major currents of architectural styles both being too new for the traditionalists and too traditional for the international style.

Mostly this style is seen as nordic-classisism but that really ignores the cross-over between beuxs-arts, functionalism, and modernism. We have a modernism that didn’t condemn what went before.

It is new though, look at how different it is to the Monkey Caste in Helsinki which although smaller has roughly the same program. The Monkey Castle is older and very much still a beuxs-arts building, Fisker in Hornbaekhaus is just that little bit later, just that little bit more well travelled and just that little bit more innovative.

Its’s still an urban block with point access owing much to a long historical heritage of urban blocks like the Landshövdingehus for example.

So here we see a building that provides good evidence that Nordic classicism also contributed to modernism in the nordics and beyond. There is a continuity which belies what both modernists, traditionalists and reactionaries normally say about the birth of modernism. It’s also true of course that this style didn’t last so long and the lurch towards a discontinuous modernism eventually happened anyway.

⚲ location: 55°41’22.4”N 12°32’25.5”E

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1. Martin Søberg, Kay Fisker: Works and Ideas in Danish Modern Architecture (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p.54.↩︎

2. ibid, p.xi.↩︎

3. See 1932 MoMA exhibition catalog The International Style.↩︎

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