Architecture

Attentive to environmental issues and sustainable development, since the nineties of the 20th century. the Denmark has consolidated an investment policy aimed at the protection of the natural and artificial landscape, through urban regeneration experiments and territorial reorganization strategies, focused, at the beginning of the new millennium, on the development of Ørestad, the new part of Copenhagen, Bari -central between the capital and Kastrup airport, as well as between Denmark and Sweden, connected since 2000 by the Øresund bridge, designed by Dissing + Weitling, a studio active since 1971.

According to itypeusa, with the construction of new infrastructures and the implementation of existing ones, some interventions have been concentrated in Ørestad, which, focusing on high quality and the high degree of livability, in a balanced integration of functions with the surrounding nature, have seen architects among the best known internationally are at work. Alongside Daniel Libeskind (with the masterplan for the central area of ​​Ørestad City, 2006), Jean Nouvel (with the new Auditorium, 2009) and Steven Holl (with the T-Husene towers project, 2006) – author of the award-winning Museum of Contemporary Art in Herning (2009)) – some of the most important Danish studios have operated there: Lundgaard & Tranberg (1983), awarded for the Tietgenkollegiet (2006), building for student residences, as well as for the Royal Danish Playhouse on the Copenhagen harbor front (2008); 3XN (1986), signatory studio of Ørestad College (2007) and of the Hotel Bella Sky (2011) at the Bella Center, as well as of the new headquarters of the United Nations in Copenhagen (2013), Green building award 2012; Bjarke Ingels (b.1974), the best known of the young protagonists of Danish architecture, founder of the BIG studio (2005) and partner, with the Belgian Julien De Smedt (since 2006 JDS architects), of the previous PLOT studio (2001- 05), signatory of buildings such as the VM Houses (2006) and Mountain Dwellings (2008) residential complexes. BIG’s work stands out for its ability to overturn the traditional approach to the transformation of the city by proposing new sustainable, playful and experimental building types. In addition to the Danish pavilion for Expo 2010 in Shanghai, among the most innovative examples are: the 8 House in Ørestad (2010), the Superkilen park (with the landscape architects of Topotek1 and the visual artists of Superflex) in Nørrebro (Copenhagen, 2012),

Alongside other innovative groups – among which, CEBRA (2001), COBE (2005), Effekt (2005) and Transform (1996), winners of the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Biennale with the Co-Evolution project – it is the work of some large studios to ensure continuity and quality: CF Møller Architects (1924) with the Darwin Center II, extension of the Natural History Museum (2008) and the National Maritime Museum (2011), both in London, and, ongoing, the hospitals of Akershus, Norway (2015), and Århus (2020), the largest in Denmark; Henning Larsen Architects (1959), with the Moesgaard Museum in Århus (2013) and the Opera House in Copenhagen (2005) and Reykjavik (Harpa, 2013), the latter designed with the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson and awarded, shortly before the Larsen’s death in 2013, with the 2013 Mies van der Rohe Award;

Bibliography: B. Ingels, Yes is more. An archicomic on architectural evolution, exhibition catalog, Copenhagen, Danish architecture center, Copenhagen 2009 (trad. It. Köln 2011); M. Ibler, 30 New projects. Global Danish architecture 5, Århus 2011; «AV Monografías», 2013, 162, nr. monograph: BIG – Bjarke Ingels 2001-2013.

Cinema

Since 2010, Danish cinema has had 13 million admissions per year (with an average per spectator higher than the European one), produces films capable of conquering about 30% of the local market and has been nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film with four works in the last seven years (Efter brylluppet, 2006, After marriage, by Susanne Bier; the then successful Hævnen, 2010, In a better world, also by Bier; En kongelig affære, 2012, A royal affair, by Nikolaj Arcel; and Jagten, 2012 , The suspect, by Thomas Vinterberg). The success of national cinema is based on the contribution of the Danish Film Institute, an institution that receives increasing contributions from the state to support film production, with an average of 25 feature films and 30 documentaries a year, with particular care for the products made by and for young people and continuous work on co-productions. In the favorable economic situation, the main authorial reference Lars Von Trier (v.) Resists: the propensity for a cinema close to the provocative gestures of contemporary art, the mockery of the relationship between gaze and ideology, the continuous succession of contradictory manifesto-works, the exhausted and sarcastic materialism of his vision of the world dialogue perfectly with the melos and the openly manipulative comedies of Bier (Efter brylluppet), with the programmatic pace of the films of Vinterberg (Jagten), with the cruel parables on the state of class signed by Per Fly (Arven, 2003, The inheritance). And also with the questioning of the politically correct films written by veteran Anders Thomas Jensen (director of Adams æbler, 2005, Adam’s Apples), the exasperated tones of the cinema of Christoffer Boe (Allegro, 2005) or those in the balance between empathy and parody in films such as En soap (2006, known as A soap) by Pernille Fischer Christensen.

Aesthetically, in today’s Danish cinema a dry, skeletal yet caricatural realism dominates, full of references to the cinema and literature of the past and driven by a mercilessly moral Protestantism, which is the basis of works such as those of Tobias Lindholm and Michael Noer. together authors of R (2010), and which ends up abstracting into the livid and sarcastic choreographies of Nicolas Winding Refn’s cinema, capable of bringing together ancestral and grotesque myth, philological cinephilia and psychoanalytic sounding (Only God forgives, 2013, Only God forgives). Criminal stories on the wave of the new Scandinavian mystery recur in the local production (the Swedish Män som hatar kvinnor, 2009, Men Who Hate Women, is directed by the Danish Niels Arden Oplev) and works on power management (such as Kapringen, 2012, by Lindholm): spectacular ethical forums on the concept of responsibility, characteristics of the ideal Danish export product, as demonstrated by the television series Forbrydelsen (on air since 2007, remade in the United States with the title The killing) and Borgen (2010-13; Borgen The power).