Gottlieb Bindesbøll (Danish language)

About the architect M.G.Bindesbøll (1800-1856) - Danish language edition.

This book is also available in an English language edition: 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 his oeuvre.
This omission has finally been remedied.

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.

We find ourselves in architecture’s complex treasure trove of contradictions and perfect equations, sudden breaks with conventions and formulas that are necessary in order to meet the new demands of the day. This is where the author delves down and wrests entirely new significances from Bindesbøll’s architecture.

This narrative consequently does not center on Bindesbøll’s private life; the man emerges through descriptions of how his buildings came to be, conditions he faced, and new information that has come to light. Bindesbøll was unconventional, at times unpredictable, peculiar, sometimes curiously ungainly, but masterful as a whole.He always won the best commissions and worked for the most prominent, modern clientele among the politicians and financiers that helped found the Danish welfare state.Bindesbøll designed the first buildings in this epoch of dawning democracy:  housing for the poor, hospitals for the insane. He was absolutely modern at a time when all others suddenly discovered that they were hopelessly old-fashioned.

This is why we have chosen to call the book:
Gottlieb Bindesbøll – Denmark’s First Modern Architect

REVIEWS
BINDESBØLL AWAKENED BY GOETHE – 5 hearts from Politiken
"From Thorvaldsens Museum to the housing scheme for the Danish Medical Association, Gottlieb Bindesbøll rode on the back of Romanticism. Peter Thule Kristensen has written a convincing monograph about an enigmatic modern master architect....The monograph is an impressive achievement." Karsten Ifversen, 15 March 2013

MASTERLY BOOK ON BINDESBØLL – Review in Aarhus Stiftstidende
"...The book will satisfy professionals – but for all of us who ’simply’ enjoy learning more about good architecture, it also offers a pleasant and knowledgeable presentation of Bindesbøll’s works – beautifully and extensively illustrated with evocative photos by Denmark’s finest architecture photographer, Jens Lindhe – and in Michael Jensen’s superb layout....This brick of a book is a chest full of beautiful experiences.Open it – and rejoice!” Henrik Sejerkilde, 25 May 2013

FROM THE TREASURY OF ARCHITECTURE
The masterly Bindesbøll – Denmark’s first modern architect
In a dawning democracy, Bindesbøll designed the first homes for the poor and hospitals for the mentally ill. He was clearly modern at a time when everybody else was suddenly discovering that they were hopelessly outdated.
 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Peter Thule Kristensen(born 1966) is an architect and an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture. He earned his PhD in 2004 with the dissertation ”Det sentimentalt moderne: Romantiske ledemotiver i det 20.århundredes bygningskunst” (The sentimentally modern: Romantic leitmotifs in 20th-century architecture and has since taught architectural history and published a large number of articles on contemporary and historical architecture. Awarded the honorary grant from Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond in recognition of his long-standing efforts to study and disseminate architectural history and, not least, his monograph on M.G.Bindesbøll (1800-1856), “one of the most important and weightiest art history publications in Denmark for many years” (quote: Ole Haslunds Kunstnerfond). 

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Jens Markus Lindhe(born 1958) graduated as an architect from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in 1984. Today he is one of Denmark’s leading architecture photographers with a prolific production that includes his own books and exhibitions as well as numerous books and publications authored by others. In 1998, Lindhe received the Academy’s Bindesbøll Medal.