the Vision of BispeBjerg Bakke - Realdania Byg

supposed to last 100 years, it should also
age gracefully. That is why natural materials
such as wood, bricks and copper
were chosen. They become patinated and
stay beautiful, even though they come to
look different over time.
Challenges and Compromises
Despite the foresight in planning Bispebjerg
Bakke, the building process has turned
up some surprises. Torben Sørensen
says: ”The cost of appliances and machines
on the building site that have been
used, for example, to mount the roof
and façades is somewhat higher than
we expected. Primarily due to the fact
that ordinary machines couldn’t be used
because the walls were curved. Only in
a few places, however, have things been
more complicated than we predicted.
But it still hurts economically: it mainly
affects NCC’s finances, of course, but the
building owners also suffer”. The building
owners have injected extra money along
the way, but they have also had to accept
that they couldn’t get everything they
wanted. This applies, for example, to the
surface of the roads between the buildings.
Here they had originally planned a
clinker brick surface, but that wasn’t possible,
so we ended up with gravel. The
building owners can then choose to change
the surface later if that is what they
want. And in this way the vision has continuously
been adapted to reality. When
the artistic ambitions of Bjørn Nørgaard
and Jesper Holm have collided with the financial
good will of the building owners,
they have also had to change their vision.
Bjørn Nørgaard says: ”We didn’t want
partition walls in the apartments. We
wanted to let each tenant decide where
the partitions should be, but we didn’t
succeed. We also had ideas about special,
curved tiles for the bathrooms, but the
budget was too tight for that”. Flemming
Borreskov has this to say about the weighing
of artistic details against economics:
”Artists and architects often want more
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