Typology: Golden Era Apartment House

Note: Yesterday and today and early next week I will be posting a few rough bits from my final project. This post includes a fair amount of historical information that has previously been posted. Typology: Golden Era Apartment House

The Golden Era apartment house is a type of building that was widely constructed in Copenhagen during and immediately prior to the city’s cultural “Golden Era” which ran from about 1800-1850. It was a mixed-use building type which served most of the residential, commercial and light industrial needs of the city. A great number of these buildings have been preserved, with modifications, and they continue to serve residential and commercial uses in the heart of Copenhagen.

A note on terminology: I have chosen the term “apartment house” because it reflects the transitional nature of this structure between modern multi-family “apartment” building of individual units and the earlier model of a manor house or merchant’s townhouse, with multiple families living under one roof related by ties of employment, vassalage, or extended family.

Physical Characteristics

The typical apartment house of this period in is about 10 meters wide and between three and five stories tall with an attic and a basement. It has one stairwell accessed from the street which  leads to the dwelling units, of which there were in the past usually at least two on each level. The ground floor was elevated roughly half a story above the street, allowing windows to the basement to be placed directly at the groundline. It fronts onto a narrow street which is about 8 meters wide.

The typical apartment house had a courtyard which which was shared with at least one other adjacent building. The courtyard was bounded by wings or mews (stables or former stables with rooms above) protruding from side of the front structure and/or a “backbuilding” constructed opposite the main building on the other side of the courtyard. This pattern produced many L and U-shaped buildings, which could combine with other buildings to fully enclose the small courtyards. Less often a building fully encloses its own courtyard in an O-shape.

Floor Plan

Pictured below is a contemporary plan for a flat from the second floor of a typical Golden Era apartment house (14 Kompagnistræde on the study block). This unit has an area of 179m2 and a selling price of $1.6 million. It is possible that this unit represents two combined units. The bathroom has likely been added during building renovation.

Below is a smaller floor plan from the 1st floor of Badstuestræde 16. It’s selling price is $700,000. The unit has an area of 97m2, and probably has not been combined with any other units. The bathroom (bad) and kitchen (køkken) have windows to the small courtyard, while the living (stue) and bedrooms (værelse) look out onto the street.    

Uses

These buildings served a variety of uses, but the most common one was housing. Usually all the floors above the ground floor were used as residences. Shops, workshops and pubs might be located either on the ground floor or in the basement and often fulfilled residential uses simultaneously. The most expensive habitations were on the 1st floor (counting in the European style with the “1st floor” being above the ground floor) and were known as the belètage. The upper floors housed those of more modest means, with the attics usually reserved for servants.

In Emergence of the Modern City, Henriette Steiner notes that the vertical arrangement of the apartments of varying quality yet sharing walls and stairs mirrors the vertical arrangement of social classes at this time, which operated in separate but overlapping worlds. The bourgeois families occupied the most visible and comfortable level of the building, with petty bourgeois, widows and widowers, and peripheral classes above and below, and the poorer classes nearly out of sight above, below, or behind the main sections of the building.

Courtyards were used for privies, light industrial work, and to corral animals. According to one estimate there were nearly 3,000 horses, 1,500 cows, 800 pigs and several dozen sheep present in the city in 1838. Industrial operations taking place in courtyards might include tanneries or blacksmiths. Backbuildings and mews were generally of inferior construction and housed servants or lower income tenants.

Construction and appearance

Brick with stucco is the dominant construction material for buildings of this type. Half-timber construction may be common for interior and read walls [investigate!]  Wood beams support floors and roofs. Roofs consist of red terra-cotta tiles. Some apartment houses feature faux-sandstone stucco styling on the ground floor. Other modest ornamentation sometimes consists of horizontal bands marking off the separation between floors and ornamentation around corner windows.

Following the great fires of the 18th century all new buildings were required to have rounded or angled corners to improve mobility through intersections, especially for fire wagons. Courtyard size was also regulated based on the size needed to accommodate a fire wagon.

Density/Capacity

We can get an idea of the population density of these buildings during the early 19th century by looking at a somewhat typical case, that of Soren Kierkegaard's house. Built in between 1795 and 1808, Steiner notes “[t]he house is typical of the early period of reconstruction after the fire in Copenhagen.” It was 14.5 meters wide, four stories tall and housed ten families, for a total of 42 individuals at the time when Soren became the head of household in 1844.

Tenancy

If we consider the case of the Kierkegaard family to be typical, the entire house would be owned by one family, which would typically reside on the 1st floor, and the rest of the flats would be rented out.
At present the apartments are sold as “freehold flats”, similar to [the same as?] a condominium. [learn more]

Energy Usage

According to Danish Building Research Institute, the typical energy usage for a pre-1850 apartment house is higher than for any other type of building they have measured. The demand for heating in an unrefurbished Golden Era apartment house is estimated to be 172.1 kWh per m2 annually (kWh/m2a), falling to 120 kWh/m2a with an “advanced refurbishment”. The CO2 emissions for this type of building are estimated to be 83kg annually per square meter. [However, the buildings’ poor energy efficiency per square meter may be compensated for by relatively small unit sizes]

Adaptations

Golden Age apartments have been adapted from their original state to modern standards. This has mostly been undertaken by private property owners. Significantly, much of the exterior built fabric remains little changed from the 19th century. Few courtyard building demolitions have occurred and few historic structures have been replaced by new ones. Modifications to the interiors of buildings have mostly involved the addition of toilets and bathing facilities and the combination of small apartments. Courtyards are now used for automobile and bicycle parking, utilities and waste disposal, and green open space. However, most courtyards associated with this building type are quite small,, allowing little natural light and putting a premium on space for utilitarian purposes. .

Variations

This basic building type is highly adaptable for different uses. It was and continues to be well suited for use as offices or institutional buildings. With some modification it can also work for educational uses. As this building type became larger and more standardized in the later decades of the 19th century it evolved into the “Late 19th Century Apartment”, the next building type to be discussed.