Kay Fisker - Works and Ideas in Danish Modern Architecture

Kay Fisker - Works and Ideas in Danish Modern Architecture. Historical-monographic study of architect Kay Fisker's oeuvre including the design of institutions in relation to the welfare state: Schools, hospitals, Aarhus University and the Mothers' Aid institution.

Kay Fisker (1893-1965) is considered one of the most influential Danish architects of the twentieth century, and yet there has existed until now no in-depth English-language study of his works and writing. 

Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book examines Fisker's key projects – from his early railway stations and innovative housing projects to the Danish Academy in Rome – and analyses his work as a historian and writer.

Fisker's output is closely associated with the functional tradition, a hybridization of international modernism and regional architectural typologies, and this book shows how his architectural poetics can be understood as an amalgamation of an ideal order with the contingent conditions of landscapes and urban sites. Hybridization is not only a valuable notion for understanding Fisker, the book argues, it can also be applied to an understanding of modernist architecture as a whole, with its various expressions, agendas and tensions both regionally and internationally.

Content

List of illustrations
Series Preface
Timeline
List of works by Kay Fisker

Introduction
Multiple facets of modern architecture
Constructing a subject

1. A clearly defined form
Simple, yet picturesque
Into the countryside
Twin houses in a garden city
Pavilion purism

2. Ordering the modern city
Contemporary classicism
Grandeur and clarity
Houses facing an urban condition

Variations of the perimeter block

3. Typologies of housing
Dissolving the perimeter
Architectural propaganda
Typological pursuits
A Copenhagen Siedlung

4. Welfare and the architecture of institutions
The hospital
The university
The sanatorium
The work camps
The Mother's Aid

5. Beyond conventions
History reinterpreted
Post-war housing policies
Suburban life
Prefab wonders

6. Time and tradition

Fisker, the historian
Transforming historical matter
The functional tradition
Order and anonymity

Conclusion
General bibliography
Bibliography of the writings of Kay Fisker
Index

About the author

Martin Søberg is Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Culture, Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen.