Gottlieb Bindesbøll - Denmark's First Modern Architect

Gottlieb Bindesbøll (1800-1856) was not just Denmark’s first modern architect. He was also one of the best. Still, no major book was ever published about this oeuvre.

Bindesbøll’s best-known buildings are spotlighted in generous photographs – the Thorvaldsen Museum, the Danish Medical Association’s Housing, and the Danish Veterinary and Agricultural University – along with equally fantastic creations such as manors, hospitals, furniture, churches, town halls, villas for the elite, sepulchral monuments, and railway stations.

Peter Thule Kristensen’s monograph on Gottlieb Bindesbøll is both a scholarly dissertation and the story of the architect’s world and buildings, written in a fluent style that can be read by everyone. A large number of original drawings and sketches are published here for the first time together with Jens Lindhe’s new photographs of all of Bindesbøll’s extant work.

Through Michael Jensen’s graphic design, we get a fine impression of an original and contradictory artist who received his first direct intellectual influences from no less than Goethe and the renowned Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted. Sense and sensibility were united in a romantic but also incipiently humanistic and modern worldview. Bindesbøll combined sobriety and infatuation, pragmatism and pathos in a large number of innovative creations.

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