sunday short #2: cycles for all seasons

i love this ad. even in the winter, copenhagen bikes!

here’s a link to the ‘official’ cph bike culture blog: http://cycleliciousness.blogspot.com/

sunday short #1: damhus sø

i went for a lovely sunday brunch today in vanløse (cph suburb-ish area) with some very nice danish friends. we then tried to walk off some of that incredibly full post-brunch feeling at damhus sø (lake). this was the first (!!) clear, sunny day we’ve had this month, and it was really nice to be outside enjoying it. damhus sø reminded me a lot of greenlake in seattle…there tons lots of joggers, bikers, powerwalkers (watch out!), and more leisurely walkers like us using the lakeside trail.

this little kid was a little less interested in feeding the swans than his father was…

swan close-up (though i was warned not to get too close. those swans are aggressive. : )

ps – kudos to the danish men’s handball team!

det blå hjørne

this is one of my favorite architecture finds in copenhagen…det blå hjørne, or “the blue corner,” as it is appropriately named, was built in 1989 and designed by the danish firm vandkunsten. det blå hjørne is located in christianshavn, one of the older parts of the city, and i really like the way that the designers fit this really unapologetically modern (and blue!) building into the neighboring context. i know that vandkunsten won an award from the copenhagen municipality for this project, but i’m not sure about the details. (i’ve put together a slightly longer piece – with more but inferior photos – about this building on my valle blog, as well as two of this firm’s other projects, if anyone is interested.) like its neighbors, det blå hjørne an apartment building…but it’s a kind of funky take on the christianshavn residential status quo. i really like that each “half” of the building mimics the mass and form of the other houses around it, but kind of turns the shape and the idea inside out – for instance, the roof is pitched at the same slope, but in a different direction, so that the “fronts” of the pieces are actually facing the corner, not the street.

“corner” detail…plus a selection of urban artwork ; )

det blå hjørne in its neighboring context…