Copenhagen Design: Museums, Showrooms and Public Space in a Nordic Capital

Most cities keep their design in museums. Copenhagen puts it on the street, in the harbour and in the parks as well, and treats the whole city as a place to test how people want to live. Copenhagen design is as much about a car-free shopping street, a waterfront architecture centre or a park built from objects chosen by its neighbours as it is about chairs and lamps. Those places, and the collection that holds the city’s design history, fill the opening days of our Scandinavian Design Small Group Tour through Denmark, Sweden and Finland. This article looks at four of them and what each one teaches.

Copenhagen design as a city-wide laboratory

Copenhagen was the UNESCO-UIA World Capital of Architecture for 2023. The recognition was less about individual landmarks than about the way the city plans streets, housing, waterfronts and public space together, and measures whether they work.

The four places on this tour approach that idea from different directions. The Danish Architecture Centre is an institution that explains how cities are made. Strøget is a street that became an experiment. Designmuseum Denmark is a collection that records a century of Danish making. Superkilen is a public park that asks who a city’s shared spaces are for. Seeing them in the same week shows how closely Copenhagen links the design of a single object to the design of the city around it, which is the thread that runs through Danish design as a whole: function, craft and everyday use, applied at every scale.

The institution: the Danish Architecture Centre at BLOX

The Danish Architecture Centre, known locally as DAC, was established as a foundation in 1985 and opened in an old warehouse on Strandgade in Christianshavn. Its founders, among them the Danish Association of Architects, wanted a place where architecture and the building industry could meet the public. In 2006 the centre served as commissioner for Denmark’s entry at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and its exhibition Co-evolution won the Golden Lion. It is now Denmark’s national architecture centre, run as a public-private partnership between the Danish state and the philanthropic foundation Realdania, with exhibitions, debates and education programs on how architecture shapes cities and communities.

Since 2018 the centre has occupied BLOX, a stack of green-glazed blocks on the harbour front designed by the Dutch practice OMA, with partner Ellen van Loon leading the design. Realdania commissioned the project in 2006, and it took almost twelve years to complete. The site, a former brewery, sits between the Danish parliament buildings on Slotsholmen and the water, and an existing road still runs through it. Rather than move the road, the architects built around and over it, so traffic passes through the building while the centre, offices and apartments stack above. In 2023 the centre opened So Danish!, which it describes as Denmark’s first permanent gallery dedicated to Danish architecture.

On day three of the tour the group walks to the centre, then continues to Christiansborg Palace on Slotsholmen, which houses the Danish Parliament, the Supreme Court and the Prime Minister’s Office. The pairing is a good one: a museum about how cities are designed, and next door a palace that shows how power has been housed in the same few streets for centuries.

The street: Strøget and the study of public life

On 17 November 1962 Copenhagen closed its main shopping street to cars. Christmas-season closures in the 1950s had paved the way, and the 1962 closure was treated as a temporary trial before it became permanent in 1964. Strøget now runs for about 1.1 kilometres between City Hall Square and Kongens Nytorv, linking a chain of older streets and squares including Amagertorv and Østergade.

What turned the experiment into a design story was measurement. The architect Jan Gehl, then teaching urban design at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, began counting how people actually used the street: how many walked, where they stopped, where they sat. His colleague Lars Gemzøe later joined him. Their findings were striking. Between 1968 and 1995 the number of people engaged in what they called stationary activities on a summer afternoon, sitting at cafés, looking in windows or listening to street musicians, rose by about 330 percent. The car-free network grew in stages in 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1992, from roughly 15,800 square metres in the original Strøget to about 100,000 square metres. Gehl and Gemzøe published the results in 1996 as Public Spaces Public Life.

The tour’s walk takes place on the afternoon of day two, after a morning that includes the square at Amalienborg Palace, home of the Danish royal family since 1784. Led by the Program Leader, the walk focuses on the Danish interior design labels with flagship stores along the street. The point is not shopping but seeing how the brands present Danish design to the world, in a street whose own design was reshaped by careful observation of how people move.

The collection: Designmuseum Denmark

If the street shows design in use, Designmuseum Denmark shows it in depth. The museum was founded in 1890 and first opened to the public in 1895 in a building on H.C. Andersens Boulevard. In 1926 it moved to its present home on Bredgade, the former Frederiks Hospital, built between 1752 and 1757 to designs by Nicolai Eigtved and Lauritz de Thurah. In the 1920s the architects Ivar Bentsen and Kaare Klint adapted the building for museum use. The long hospital wards, planned around the Grønnegården garden for light and fresh air, became galleries.

The museum reopened on 19 June 2022 after a two-year renovation that kept the historic building and reworked its shop and café. The collection is broad. It runs from Danish furniture, lighting and crafts to an internationally regarded group of Japanese sword guards, and the museum uses it to ask how design responds to present-day questions as well as to tell the story of the past. Among the eight exhibitions that opened with the renovation was The Future Is Present, on how design responds to challenges such as climate and identity. Exhibitions change, so check the museum’s website for what is on display when you travel.

The tour visits on day five, at the end of a day devoted to design as an export industry. In the morning the group visits the Danform Showroom, a showroom the tour itinerary credits to Jørn Utzon, for a talk on design in export markets, then the showroom of the Danish textile maker Kvadrat. Arriving at the museum after two working showrooms puts the collection in context: these are the objects, and the ideas, that the showrooms are still selling.

The public realm: Superkilen in Nørrebro

Superkilen is the most surprising of the four. It is a park, officially opened in June 2012, stretching for about 750 metres through Nørrebro, one of Copenhagen’s most diverse districts. It was designed by the artists’ group Superflex with Bjarke Ingels Group and the German landscape architects Topotek1, and it is divided into three zones. The Red Square, painted in reds, oranges and pinks, is given over to recreation. The Black Market at the centre is a traditional square with a fountain and barbecue grills. The Green Park is a landscape of grassy hills for picnics and play.

What makes it a piece of design thinking rather than simply a park is how its furniture was chosen. Local residents come from 62 countries, and the park holds 108 plants and objects that reflect those backgrounds: swings from Iraq, benches from Brazil, a bus stop from the former Soviet Union, a fountain from Morocco, litter bins from England and manhole covers from Zanzibar and Poland. It is a public space that tells its users they belong there, and an argument that design can be about recognition as much as appearance.

The group stops at Superkilen on the way back to the hotel on day four. The day begins at the furniture maker Fritz Hansen in Allerød, maker of Arne Jacobsen’s Ant and Egg chairs, and continues after lunch at Restaurant Paustian with a visit to Paustians Hus, a waterfront showroom completed in 1987 and one of the key works of Jørn Utzon’s architecture in Denmark. Moving in one day from a furniture maker and a showroom to a neighbourhood park makes the range of Copenhagen design plain.

How Copenhagen sets up the rest of the route

The Copenhagen days end with a drive north on day six to Jørn Utzon’s Fredensborg Houses of 1959 to 1962 and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art north of Copenhagen. From there the route continues through Sweden and Finland, where the question Copenhagen asks, how design should serve daily life, gets its own national answers; our guide to Scandinavian design across Denmark, Sweden and Finland follows that thread through the whole journey.

Is there free time in Copenhagen to revisit these places?

Yes, some. The afternoon of day three is free after the visits to the Danish Architecture Centre and Christiansborg Palace, and day one leaves time to settle in before the welcome dinner. That is enough to return to Strøget at your own pace or spend longer in a gallery that caught your interest.

How much walking does the Copenhagen design program involve?

The tour is graded Level 2 (Moderate): travellers should be able to take part in three to five hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. They should also be able to carry their own luggage and climb and descend stairs. Several of the Copenhagen visits, including the Danish Architecture Centre and Christiansborg Palace on day three, are reached on foot.

Are entry fees to the Danish Architecture Centre and Designmuseum Denmark included?

Yes. The tour includes all excursions, entrance fees and local guides, so neither visit carries an extra ticket. Opening hours for independent visits are set by each institution, so check their official websites if you plan to return during free time.

Beyond the design itinerary

Copenhagen’s design culture sits inside a much older city. The Tivoli Gardens, laid out in the centre in 1843, are a much earlier example of space in Copenhagen designed for public pleasure, and our article on Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens tells that story. For the longer history of the country, from the Viking age to the modern state, see our guide to discovering Scandinavia and Viking Denmark, and for practical matters such as language and when to visit, our answers to common questions about Denmark.

Copenhagen design is easiest to understand on foot, moving from an architecture centre to a pedestrian street, a museum and a neighbourhood park in the space of a few days. Each shows a different way of asking the same question: how should a city serve the people who live in it? From Copenhagen the tour continues by train to Aarhus and on to Sweden’s design schools and glassworks, carrying that question with it.