Spaces & Places

Spaces & Places
Schønherr

Architect: Schønherr A/S

27 x 21 cm | 9 x 11 in
232 colour and b/w ills | 256 pages
Paperback

Available in the UK January 2018

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 in Spaces & Places: Schønherr, the practice’s fi rst full-length publication.

Unravelling around the Danish concept of skønhed—roughly translated to ‘the beautiful life’—this book is a powerful yet stoic observation of the role of aesthetics within Danish culture, both built and impressionistic, urban and rural. Schønherr takes readers through inner-city installation projects from the PIECE bench in Copenhagen to the practice’s extensive work in Aarhus, which includes their projects “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 in 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 refl ects on the practice’s commitment to pursuing truth through architecture.

Spaces & Places: Schønherr 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 effi ciency 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 refl ects the ideology of the social-democratic culture within which these places have come into being. Schønherr: 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.