the Vision of BispeBjerg Bakke - Realdania Byg

expensive at every meeting. In the end
the mood was so unpleasant that Bjørn
Nørgaard emailed everyone telling them
not to come to any more meetings. We
just had to swallow the pill, so I called the
NCC concern and asked them to step in as
the contractor”.
Bjørn Nørgaard: “Cooperation with the
master craftsmen simply broke down,
though I can’t really say why. Money
certainly played a role, but it was also a
question of ingrained habits. The master
craftsmen were not able to take a long,
hard look at their own working culture,
and then move on to show that the craftcentred
approach could compete with industrial
production. One of the things we
discussed was a readiness to accept that
one could not always have one’s own way.
Were they prepared, for example, to put
their own finances on the line and reveal
them to the others?” A large number of
the master craftsmen were not prepared
to do this, so when they put in their bids
for the construction of Bispebjerg Bakke
the upshot was that it would cost fifty
percent more than first estimated. “We
were shocked how expensive it would
be to construct the whole thing from the
bottom up. We couldn’t go along with it”,
explains Flemming Borreskov, Chief Executive
Officer of Realdania. The whole Bispebjerg
Bakke project was in danger; in
fact, there was considerable doubt as to
whether it could be built at all. As Peter
Cederfeld, Chief Executive Officer at Realea,
puts it: “When it became clear how
expensive it would be to construct the
building without prefabricated sections,
we began to consider whether it could be
done at all. On more than one occasion
we began to doubt that the project would
ever be realised”.
On the Way to New Solutions
Not only did the dream of constructing
the building from the bottom up have to
be abandoned, but also the idea that the
One of Bjørn Nørgaard’s early sketches of a cast-iron grating.
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