It is such a captivating image for many writers that they find it difficult not to include it when they have to tell about Aalborg, it is simply too good.
That very special rawness, which authors such as Jens Martin Eriksen, Jakob Ejersbo and Carsten Jensen have described with stories about a Danish Manchester and children who surpass adults in brutality.
Not many decades ago, the whole city drank and pumped huge quantities of eternite, cement and alcohol out to Denmark and the world.
This is what you take as a starting point when you really want people to understand the transformation that Aalborg has gone through on glossy magazine pages – with a splash of joy at the hard work and something indeterminate that you assume must be traced like a DNA.
A wildness perhaps, or is it defiance?
Regardless, there’s one factory that goes back and forth when it comes to cultivating fascination:
The sprit, which will soon stand as a symbol of the Aalborg of the future with a 30 meter high monumental work designed by Tomás Saraceno, well-known Argentinian architect and artist.
But already when De Danske Spritfabrikker built the factory, they pointed to the future to a degree that few know about.
The yellow walls are repeated in all Spritfabrikken’s stairwells, as are the Maltese crosses and the red doors. Photo: Lars Pauli
Novo Nordisk of the time
When De Danske Spritfabrikker chose to concentrate alcohol production from many small to a few large factories in the 1920s, they did something that no Danish company had done before them.
They created a design manual.
With strict and consistent rules for how everything should look – from stationery and bottles to bicycles and horse-drawn carriages – inspired by the great manufacturer of electric motors – AEG in Berlin and American Henry Ford’s thoughts on serial production and efficiency – the great hero of the time.
The architecture of Spritten had to be as easily recognizable as the design on the schnapps bottles. Photo: Lars Pauli
If you entered a staircase belonging to De Danske Spritfabrikker, you had no doubt where you were when you saw the yellow paint on the walls and the tiles with Maltese crosses.
They were the Novo Nordisk or Mærsk of the time, and everything they sent out of the factory had to be easily recognizable and legible in the streetscape.
The same should be the architecture.
To ensure this, they hired Alfred Cock-Clausen, a relatively newly trained architect who had worked for some of the greatest architects of the time: Hack Kampmann and Gotfred Tvede.
As a house architect under De Danske Spritfabrikker, Alfred Cock-Clausen got his own design studio, where he designed villas, municipal housing developments and factories.
Before Spritten in Aalborg, Alfred Cock-Clausen designed a factory for De Danske Spritfabrikker in Hobro (1925). After the plant in Aalborg, it became factories in Randers, Slagelse, Roskilde and Copenhagen The Royal Library, Portrait Collection
The standardization of construction should give people “an impression of the company’s size and at the same time a feeling of solidity and order”, as stated in the trade magazine Arkitekten in the years.
And in 1929 it came – Alfred Cock-Clausen’s most prestigious assignment:
Until then, the largest contiguous industrial plant in Denmark located on the waterfront in Aalborg.
For the first time, he was able to create something that could match the General Electric Company’s (AEG) turbine hall in Berlin – one of the first places in the world where an industrial building had its own independent expression.
The AEG-Turbinehal in Berlin was built in 1909. In addition to designing the building, Peter Behrens also designed all the company’s products, and he is known as the world’s first industrial designer.
The key word was modernity, you wanted to capture the progress and economy that was booming. Something that also made itself felt in Aalborg, where the old Renaissance town was demolished to get the cars to the Limfjordsbroen, which had just been built.
It was an urban development move that was considered nothing less than brilliant, and Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning did not hide his excitement over all that bloody insanity.
Spritten was built over 20 years after AEG-Turbinehal in Berlin, but there are clear points of similarity in the architectural choices. Photo: Lars Pauli
“There is something American, something appealing about this. It serves Aalborg’s citizens to their credit that they paved the way, that they didn’t give a damn if there were old houses with 100 years of history”, he cheered in his speech.
Stauning was also there when De Danske Spritfabrikker’s new factory by the Limfjorden was inaugurated in 1931, and over the years it has become a symbol of industrialization in Denmark.
A historical period that has acquired its very own expression.
References to German functionalism can be seen in the tight systems and lines and the choice to leave the boilers standing freely at the front – it is sober and dry. Photo: Lars Pauli
National romanticism and minimalism
When Alfred Cock-Clausen sketched out the new large factory plant in the late 1920s, it took place in a time of wild cultural upheaval. It has been called the birth year of modern Denmark.
It is a decade marked by unemployment, bank crashes, labor market conflicts and the first social democratic prime minister. But it is also a time of modernization in the industry – and with new ideas and art trends
There was modernism, surrealism, cultural radicalism and Nazism to name a few of the isms, and on the literary scene Rudolf Broby-Johansen described the horrors of the betrayal of the big cities, while Tom Kristensen and Poul Henningsen paid tribute to their beauty.
The divisions can also be seen in the architecture of the time.
Here a strong neoclassicist wave prevailed and a national romantic one with a fascination with, for example, half-timbered houses and granite from Nordic mountains.
And then there was the German wave, which dictated minimalism and austerity.
Many industrial plants are characterized by the fact that they have been built over and over endlessly, but not at Spritten. Here, the only significant change is the east wing, where a floor has been added on top. Photo: Lars Pauli
Brick expressionism was the name given to the style in which the 10-storey Chilehaus office building in Hamburg was built in the 1920s, and which Alfred Cock-Clausen must have seen, and at the Bauhaus, the German school of design and architecture in Berlin, the industrial mass production and functionality.
Alfred Cock-Clausen drew from it all and more in his design of the Spritten.
The booze in the 1930s. Although there were fewer employees at Spritten than at the cement factories, it was known to be something special, and it soon became a place visitors were taken to show off the city. Aalborg City Archives
References to German functionalism can be seen in the tight systems and lines and the choice to leave the boilers standing freely at the front – it is sober and dry.
The neoclassical inspiration can be seen in the clear, straight lines, the distinctive column motifs created by displacements of the bricks, geometric patterns and the accentuation of the cornices – it had to be a large and clean architecture.
And then he loosened the tie a bit and added a touch of art deco with the round windows with bars with six-pointed stars of David.
The stars of David in the windows have been debated for ages – is it a nod to founder Henius’ background as a Polish Jew, or is it an alchemical sign of distillation? The star is also called the brewer’s star; in beer production, it was placed above the brewing vessel, where it was supposed to exert its special power and protect the beer wort. Photo: Lars Pauli
But it is also a very Danish building.
With the red and yellow brick facades, he connects the buildings with Danish building tradition.
At the back, furthest out towards the harbour, the coal yard was located. Facing the street is the administration building, which was supposed to be what people could admire from the outside. Photo: Lars Pauli
And the facility with the fine administration building and the clean lines in the courtyard make the buildings almost resemble a classic Danish manor in its structure.
As in other factory buildings of the time, you can read the place of the individual buildings in the hierarchy based on the amount of decoration.
The administration building, which is the face of Spritten towards the city, got a gable roof and gables. Photo: Lars Pauli
The distillery got the whole arm with beautiful rooms, and the administration building got gabled roofs, dormers and French balconies, while not much decoration was sacrificed in the potato and corn field.
However, it was not quite as modern as in the USA – here Henry Ford created assembly halls without windows illuminated only by artificial light, so that the workers could work in shifts and were not affected by the rhythm of the day outside.
You didn’t go that far in Aalborg, people had the right to daylight. The same applied to beer, which Henry Ford forbade the consumption of in all his factories – including the one in Copenhagen.
You weren’t in Aalborg – you were Danish and not a monster.
The article was created on the basis of interviews with historian Morten Pedersen and Thomas Birket-Smith, architect in City and Country in Aalborg Municipality.
Spritten: All of Denmark’s industrial memory
- It’s probably something that few people like to think about, but the Spritten plant was partly established by Copenhageners and an immigrant – Isidor Henius was a Polish Jew, and the financier CF Tietgen was a Copenhagener.
- It is not Aalborg’s merit alone that the buildings are still standing. When the Danish Agency for Culture designated Spritten as one of Denmark’s 25 national industrial monuments in 2007, it was because Spritten is not just local history, but Danish industrial and Danish history, even a major work, and the largest overall industrial preservation.
2024-11-09 19:08:00
#Novo #Nordisk #30s #Danish #company
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