A beloved Venetian-inspired art palace in Copenhagen built by the Danish public sector to house the donated art collection of a brewery oligarch, located on a road widened during the car-brained 1950s.
The culmination of a project to turn sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen into a national icon for the emerging Danish nation-state–Thorvaldsen as a sort of Danish demigod with this museum-tomb as his pantheon–this is a distinctive example of national mythmaking, architectural innovation, & adaptive reuse.
Chief Architect of the DSB Heinrich Wenck wanted to create a station "suitable for Denmark–for our country's situation and its character–so that the last impression that departing Danes got was the same as that which met the arriving foreigners: something Danish”.
Gyldenløvesgade has changed remarkably little in the last 115 years or so–but that lack of visible change obscures a pretty wild story. That brick Neo-Renaissance building on the left with the eyecatching gables? Super interesting, it turns out.