2021
2021
Gernes (1925–1996) spent his career bringing art into everyday Danish institutions — schools, hospitals, post offices — on the conviction that art belonged equally to everyone; his 1989 decoration of Palads Teatret, transforming a difficult, awkwardly sited Neo-Baroque building into what was effectively a city-sized artwork, was among the best-known results. Palads itself carried decades of civic history before Gernes ever touched it: built as an adaptive reuse of Copenhagen's second central railway station after the station was relocated, it became the city's largest cinema, and a cultural landmark whose Gernes-era colour scheme has divided opinion ever since — loved by some as a pastel icon, dismissed by others who preferred the plain white the building never actually had.
With Palads now facing demolition amid pressure to redevelop the area around Axel Torv and the Tivoli Gardens, the exhibition used the building as a way into a broader debate about who Copenhagen's urban development is for. At its centre was an open call: an ideas competition inviting anyone to propose a future for the area around Palads Teatret, on two conditions — respecting the building's existing decoration, and incorporating a cinema fit for the future. Twenty-six entries were shown, judged by a panel including Nicolai Bo Andersen, Maria Bordorff, Ulrikke Neergaard, Marie Nipper, Christian Pagh, Bibi Henriksen Saugman, and Marie Hajslund, with Camilla van Deurs, then Copenhagen's City Architect, advising the committee. The exhibition also presented a series of Gernes' own works alongside the competition, playful and unpretentious meditations on utopia.
The studio founder submitted an entry to the competition in collaboration with Luana Iuliani, one of the twenty-six shown. The proposal's premise was that Palads didn't need new architecture — only a new way of encountering what was already there. Rather than adding to the building or its surroundings, the project drew its entire formal vocabulary from the façade itself: the sculptural white volumes populating the square at 9 Axel Torv were abstractions of Palads' own arches and window bays, extracted from the building and set loose in the plaza as freestanding objects to move around, sit on, and get lost among. The gesture treated the square as a stage and the existing building as its only necessary set piece, rendered as a series of surreal, dreamlike scenes. The proposal was dedicated to the everyday, unscheduled moments a city rarely designs for — a break, an encounter, a few minutes lost in a dream before continuing on — aiming to make the pleasure Palads already offered inside its cinemas available outside them too, without asking the city to build anything new to get there.
Research & Analysis
Concept Development
Spatial Planning & Design
Copywriting & Editing
Print & Digital Design
Project Management
Team:
Valeria Granillo, Luana Iuliani.