Conference Abstract | Nina Stener Jørgensen

“Form Follows People”

Bettering daily life on all levels of society through design has always been a hallmark of Scandinavian architecture and the cornerstone of so-called welfare architecture. The ways in which this honorable goal has been believed to be best achieved has developed from the 1960’s focus on public participation and advocating, to various forms of integrating future users in the design process.

Today the City of Copenhagen’s special attention to the quality of outdoor spaces and increased pedestrianisation of infrastructure has resulted in a renewed focus on the development of user involvement. In order to understand this new strain of welfare architecture, this paper looks at Danish office COBE’s transformation of Nørreport in central Copenhagen, from rundown station to so-called urban living room.

By mapping pedestrian movement, COBE imagined how people would naturally move if they were released from the constraints of cars, bicycles stands as well as traffic lights. Following the dictum: “Form Follows People” COBE not only used the patterns generated to create the infrastructural layout when redesigning the station’s above ground plaza, but also claimed that the station was in fact “designed by people”. A striking architectural reasoning where the public was both framed as a vital prerequisite to the design but also as the unaware producers of space.

This paper traces this particular type of mapping back to the teachings of Jan Gehl, whom COBE highlights as an inspiration for their urban scale projects. The schemes of pedestrian movement Gehl developed with his students in the 1960’s bear striking similarities to those of COBE, however without the immediacy of the critique of modernism; how can this gesture be perceived today. This paper aims to ask how we can begin to understand designs such as COBE’s Nørreport; designs that do not claim to be participatory as such,
yet formally maintain the social agenda of participation and welfare politics.

Nina Stener Jørgensen is a PhD student at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Architecture, where she graduated from in 2018 with a MSc. Engineering in Urban Studies. Studying architectural models of participation from the 1960s in light of today’s so-called smart city, her PhD research focuses on producing a genealogy of what could be referred to as a post-participatory condition in architecture.