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.

It’s one of the first high-rises in central Copenhagen, a gesamtkunstwerk designed by one of Denmark’s most famous architects, but the irony of the SAS Royal Hotel is that only the least notable part of the building–its architecture–survives unchanged.

I did this one because I thought it was Denmark’s first curtain wall, designed by Arne Jacobsen. …lol, nope—that is Nyropsgade 18, next door. This is Nyropsgade…14, designed a few years later by the significantly-less-famous August Rasmussen & Torben Miland Petersen and completed in 1958.

Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris directly inspired Ferdinand Meldahl’s plans for Søtorvet, a four building development envisioned as a grand new northern gateway to central Copenhagen.

Østerbrogade 44 lost the entirety of its facade ornamentation in a 1935 modernizing remodel—the comically deadpan conservation assessment describes it as “somewhat dead”—but otherwise the northern edge of Copenhagen’s Little Triangle is basically the same 120 years later.