From The Companion Series
Nordic architecture has been a long, slow tutor in how space can think, but for me, this lesson crystallized in Denmark—walking through Copenhagen with its careful sidewalks, water edges, and brick rhythms. The buildings rarely shout; they hum. A modest housing block in Østerbro, a renovated harbor warehouse, or a small school on the city’s fringe all seem to ask the same quiet question: how will bodies move and feel here? In this tradition, form is less about spectacle than about how everyday life unfolds: the height of a window when you sit down, the way a stair draws you into light, the roughness of brick that registers in your hand as you lean. Nordic architecture taught me that attention is not only visual; it is distributed through touch, temperature, acoustics, and urban rhythm.
Jan Gehl’s work on Copenhagen’s public spaces gave me a vocabulary for this intuition. In Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space and later in Cities for People (Gehl 2010), he describes the city not as a composition of objects but as a choreography of encounters, distances, and durations, based on decades of observing how people actually use streets and squares. Benches, façades, arcades, bike lanes—these are not neutral elements; they are invitations, or obstacles, to sociability and care. Seen through Gehl, Copenhagen becomes a laboratory of “life between”: the micro-thickness of thresholds, the subtle protection from wind, the slight widening of a sidewalk where people might stop. Studios like Sophus Søbye Arkitekter, based in Copenhagen and known for carefully sited public and cultural buildings, work inside this ethos—designing scout huts, schools, and community centers that prioritize sequence, light, and everyday use over icon-making. The same could be said, in different registers, of offices such as KHR Architecture or Danielsen Architecture: practices for whom functionality, human scale, and context quietly guide form.
Reading Juhani Pallasmaa’s The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses sharpened this sense of multisensory architecture. First published in 1996, the book has become a classic of architectural theory for its critique of ocularcentrism and its insistence that architecture address all the senses, not just vision. Many contemporary Danish projects—timber-clad extensions, brick courtyards, carefully proportioned stairwells—feel composed with this in mind: the sound of footsteps on wood, the muted echo of a double-height space, the softness of daylight filtered through slats. Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980) offers a complementary language, arguing that good architecture intensifies the character of a site and provides an “existential foothold” for its inhabitants. Taken together, Gehl, Pallasmaa, and Norberg-Schulz helped me see Nordic architecture not as a style but as a way of attending: an ethos that values situatedness, modesty, and sensory depth.
This spatial ethos has seeped into my ethnographic practice. When I design layouts, cabinets, or small zines, I often think of them like tiny pieces of Copenhagen: as sequences of thresholds and pauses. A cover is a square; an opening page is a plaza; a fragment is a side street where attention slows down. Gehl’s insistence on observing how people actually use space resonates with how I observe readers moving through trays, tins, or online cabinets. The careful handling of transitions—from outside to inside, from public to intimate—in Danish buildings echoes in how I structure texts: where breaks appear, how images interrupt, how footnotes open side routes. Nordic architecture becomes, in this sense, a companion for Studio Ethnography—a reminder that the method can be spatial composition.
There is also a climatic and ecological lesson. Copenhagen’s architecture and planning negotiate wind, rain, low winter light, and increasingly uneven weather patterns. Materials—brick, timber, zinc, glass—are assembled to mediate rather than erase these conditions. Light is guided, not maximized; shelter is partial, leaving some exposure intact. This sensibility informs my alterecological work: thinking how infrastructures, cabinets, and even digital interfaces might shelter fragile fragments—plant cuttings, pig residues, urban remains—without sealing them off from their environments. If a tin, a tray, or a webpage is a micro-building, Nordic architecture teaches me to design it as an attentive envelope: minimal, but generous in how it hosts what it contains.
To learn from Nordic architecture, finally, is to accept slowness. These buildings rarely reveal themselves at once; they ask for repeated visits, seasonal changes, different times of day. Ethnography shares this temporality. It is not a quick capture but a practice of returning—of noticing how light shifts, how use gradually engraves a space. Copenhagen, read through Gehl and through the work of its architects, has helped me imagine an ethnography that aspires less to explanation and more to careful composition: arranging materials, concepts, and voices so they can coexist without being forced into harmony. A method, like a building, can be quiet and still be decisive.
Hands-on exercise: Drawing a Threshold in the City
Think of a specific (or Copenhagen-like [or not]) threshold—a metro entrance, a courtyard passage, a café doorway, a bike path crossing. From memory, sketch the sequence from street to interior: where you slow, where you turn, where the light changes. Then design a short ethnographic sequence (three to five fragments or panels) that mimics that movement. How does thinking like Gehl—or like a Danish office designing for everyday life—change how you compose your material?
References
- Gehl, Jan. 1987. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space. Washington, DC: Island Press (English trans. of Livet mellem husene).
- Gehl, Jan. 2010. Cities for People. Washington, DC: Island Press.
- Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1980. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. London: Academy Editions / New York: Rizzoli.
- Pallasmaa, Juhani. 1996. The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. London: Academy Editions. (Subsequent editions: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005; Wiley, 2012, 2024).
- Sophus Søbye Architects. Copenhagen-based architectural practice, established 2004. Project examples include DDS Søndermarken Scout Hut and cultural/community buildings in Denmark.