Spaces and Places ― Sch鷢herr Sk鷢hed

Danish Landscape practice Schønherr meditates upon architecture’s connection to beauty and its ability to enrich everyday life while strengthening our relationship to history, context and place within From Schønherr Skønhed: Spaces and Places, the practice’s first full-length publication.

Unravelling around the Danish concept of skønhed—roughly translated to ‘the beautiful life’—this book is a powerful yet stoic observation on the role of aesthetics within Danish culture, both built and impressionistic, urban and rural. Schønherr takes readers through inner-city installation projects such as the PIECE bench in Copenhagen to the practice’s extensive work in Aarhus, which includes The Forest, 2010, The City Park, 2012, The Plaza, 2014, and Bishops Square, 2016.

Developed on the occasion of the annual Aarhus Festival—the largest cultural festival Denmark—these projects temporarily transform the streets and parks into extraordinary public spaces, changing the natural topography of the city to attract citizens and bring them together. In addition to these more performative projects, Schønherr has contributed to the timeless re-integration and democratisation of religious and infrastructural sites including the Ribe Cathedral and Aarhus train station, using pattern, colour, and material to merge the historical with the sensational, maintaining a minimal yet distinct tactic of intervention that reflects on the practice’s commitment to pursuing truth through architecture.

Schønherr Skønhed: Spaces and Places invokes the language of aesthetics that Schønherr has developed over the course of its 20-year practice in order to seamlessly reinstate history and cultural memory with contemporary life; crisis management with environmental efficiency; and the spectacular with the everyday. This book celebrates Schønherr’s ability to harmonise infrastructural, systematic and regulatory design with a timeless Danish aesthetic that reflects the ideology of the social-democratic culture in which these places have come into being. Schønherr Skønhed: Spaces and Places is as much about the social fabric of cities at large as it is about a unique practice’s experience shaping the cultural landscape of Copenhagen and beyond.