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MASTER NYROP’S BUILDINGS
From elaborate Viking-style to blocks of no-ornamentation
Martin Nyrop (1849-1921) was a skilled craftsman, and architect, naturally, as
well as a designer, but first and foremost he was an artisan and craftsman, a
builder in the original and best sense of the word, using bricks, iron and wood as
a setting for what the buildings were designed to be used for.
He began his career as a carpenter, became a journeyman in 1869, and attended
the school of architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
Furthermore, he showed how much could be achieved with wooden construc
tions when drawings had to be designed and exhibition pavilions built for the
occasion of the Nordic Industrial Exhibition in Copenhagen in 1888.
The vast exhibition pavilions in the modern western hemisphere in the second
half of the 19th century were defined by a hazardous competition of who could
create the longest span or build the highest constructions with cast iron columns
and steel girders, creating examples like Crystal Palace in London in 1851, and
the Eiffel Tower and the Machine Hall in the Paris World Exhibition in 1889. In
Copenhagen Nyrop followed another course and went his own way by choosing
wood but nonetheless building high into the air with his timber dome, considerably
higher than the Copenhagen Round Tower of 110 feet but not as high as his own
later brick-built record of 320 feet, namely the City Hall Tower.
The dome of the exhibition with its top lanterns and the row of pointed gables
had features in common with the Baptistery in Pisa. The ridge turrets higher up
were inspired by Theoderik’s sepulchral monument in Ravenna, which Nyrop
had admired during his visits the years before, and the corner towers reminded
the Copenhageners of the great Turkish mosques.
However, in the overall immediate appearance of the entire exhibition structure,
the rising 19th century interest in Norwegian stave churches was evident, and
the Viking-like appearance was particularly manifested in the treatment of timber
and boards.
In 1906 Martin Nyrop designed Bispebjerg Hospital, where he simplified the
shape of the roofs and facades in the brick-built pavilions. In Landsarkivet from
1891 he worked with tiles and bricks on a monumental scale, though already ten
years earlier, even before the trip abroad, he had tested these materials in the
brick-built round gasholder at Østre Gasværk in 1881.
Even though the latter construction was a quite prosaic assignment, Nyrop
added architectural curves to the rotunda as well as circular windows, which
both musicals and experimental theatrical productions benefit from today. That
the building has the same measurements as the Pantheon in Rome seems to be
caused by a case of engineering coincidence.
It is obvious that though Nyrop trained as a carpenter and used the inherent
possibilities in wood in his great exhibition pavilion assignment in 1888, he also
mastered the tile and brick bonds, not to mention the building constructions that
brickwork makes possible.