Kay Fisker (1893-1965) is considered one of the most influential Danish architects of the twentieth century, and yet there has existed until now no in-depth English-language study of his works and writing.
Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book examines Fisker’s key projects – from his early railway stations and innovative housing projects to the Danish Academy in Rome – and analyses his work as a historian and writer.
Fisker’s output is closely associated with the functional tradition, a hybridization of international modernism and regional architectural typologies, and this book shows how his architectural poetics can be understood as an amalgamation of an ideal order with the contingent conditions of landscapes and urban sites. Hybridization is not only a valuable notion for understanding Fisker, the book argues, it can also be applied to an understanding of modernist architecture as a whole, with its various expressions, agendas and tensions both regionally and internationally.
List of illustrations
Series Preface
Timeline
List of works by Kay Fisker
Introduction
Multiple facets of modern architecture
Constructing a subject
1. A clearly defined form
Simple, yet picturesque
Into the countryside
Twin houses in a garden city
Pavilion purism
2. Ordering the modern city
Contemporary classicism
Grandeur and clarity
Houses facing an urban condition
Variations of the perimeter block
3. Typologies of housing
Dissolving the perimeter
Architectural propaganda
Typological pursuits
A Copenhagen Siedlung
4. Welfare and the architecture of institutions
The hospital
The university
The sanatorium
The work camps
The Mother’s Aid
5. Beyond conventions
History reinterpreted
Post-war housing policies
Suburban life
Prefab wonders
6. Time and tradition
Fisker, the historian
Transforming historical matter
The functional tradition
Order and anonymity
Conclusion
General bibliography
Bibliography of the writings of Kay Fisker
Index
The modern movement in architecture was a sweeping and multivalent phenomenon that changed the lives of millions of people across political, cultural and geographical boundaries worldwide.
Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture aims to create a more fine-grained, multi-perspectival history of the movement, by bringing to light the work of a wide range of architects whose significance is being reappraised in contemporary scholarship.
The series will:
- Uncover the work of 'forgotten' architects of the modern era and demonstrate their critical importance in architectural history.
- Offer a collection of in-depth monographic studies of modern architects, bringing valuable new research to scholarly attention.
- Broaden the geographical and cultural scope of the history of modernism.
The aim is to nuance and enrich our understanding of the history of modern architecture, and explore the breadth and complexity of the global networks that underwrote the modern movement.