Zen and the Art of Guided Walking Tours
Updated: Sep 12
Or, wandering around Denmark on our Interior Architecture Short Study Tour
For those of you reading this without a DIS student ID or Copenhagen residency card (suckers) core course week is to my school what “Learn By Doing” is to Cal Poly and a superiority complex is to Harvard, it’s part of our college and our culture. From Monday to Friday, we forget every class except our core course, in my case, interior architecture, and travel by bus, bike, and foot to cram in art and culture across western Denmark, including two nights in Herning and Aarhus.
On day 1, I biked to our field trip in Sorgenfri to avoid an expensive train ticket. As it turns out, the ticket was not overpriced, I was being miserly and stupid, and I ended up biking 25 miles that day on a bicycle that sounds like two pieces of sheet metal flirting. The lengths I will go to save twenty bucks. Still, it was a warm morning, I had music in my headphones, and the supremely flat Danish miles unfolded ahead of me. Things could have been worse.
Our main focus thus far in Interior Architecture has been the design and curation of gallery exhibits, so Monday was spent designing and installing an exhibit for the works of artist Jens Overgaard Christensens. His works are all paintings of birds, but are elaborate in range. He can paint a bird in such precise, scientific, and immaculate detail it seems poised to flap off the page, or use daubs of watercolor to suggest unmistakably hatchlings in forest duff. Our job was to assess the collection, find a theme, and install the show for its Friday opening.
After settling the first two tasks over Vietnamese spring rolls from the bodega next door we moved to the installation. We had hammers, nails, drills and screws, and as the tallest (and maybe most fatherly?) person in my studio I was appointed to install the fixtures. Quickly, we realized the cafe hosting the show must have also been a bomb shelter, because the walls were solid concrete. After a lot of sweating and nail bending we had to call in the big guns to help us bore into the walls. Shouts out to handyman Karsten, we’d still be hitting our thumbs with hammers without you. We hung the paintings in an intuitive flow all afternoon, and toasted with rhubarb sodas when the last was hung. It was so fun and exhausting and though the grim headwind blew my whole 12 mile ride home, I was satisfied. I felt like a real curator.
On Tuesday we visited several museums, but oh my god any museum now pales in comparison to the Frilandsmuseet. (https://frilandsmuseet.dk) When I heard “open air museum” I expected some windmills and bored teenage employees in period piece costumes giving monologues to school kids and trying to hide their phones in their petticoats. What I got instead was the most magical free range museum experience ever, not a single museum building but an entire historic village spread across a few acres. Houses, farmsteads, workshops, and gardens from across Denmark were carefully dismantled and reconstructed there starting 125 years ago, allowing you to literally wander through more than 350 years of rural Scandinavian life. What makes it so special is that nothing is trapped behind glass, you can step inside the homes, hit your head on ancient wooden beams, meet farm animals, and roam freely through landscapes that feel like a village momentarily suspended in time. My teacher joked that it would never fly in America because someone would eat it on all the uneven floor planks and sue, and she was right. It felt like real exploration. All the homes are totally furnished, there are clogs by the door and you can almost imagine still-hot ashes in the hearth. It’s a trip.
The following two days were the overnight portions of our study tour. We followed our two professors in and out of castles and museums like a gaggle of sketchbook toting ducklings. Our intrepid leader, my studio professor Marie-Louise, is filled to the brim with knowledge of Danish architecture, history, and culture. She walks with such purpose that it always looks as though she is facing into a brisk wind. She is funny and stylish, and I keep realizing how famous she really is here, randomly catching her in a newspaper clipping or youtube video. Everywhere we go, she knows someone. She says it is because Denmark is small, but I know she is being humble.
We spent the first night in Herning, at Højhuset. (https://hojhuset.com/en/) Højhuset rises from the flat Jutland landscape like a monument to Denmark’s 1960s optimism. It was built in the middle of the last century as a folk high school for textile workers. Danish folk high schools are residential, non-degree programs somewhere between a liberal-arts semester, summer camp, and community retreat. Around seventy still operate today. You can go to a folk high school for everything from art, woodworking, and weaving to writing and politics. Though it is no longer a folk school, creativity and peace seemed to exude from Højhuset's walls, and traces of it remain in practice: we finished the day with a long table communal dinner. We were required to sing before dinner from a book that looked sort of like a hymnal but was filled with songs about brotherhood instead. I've never felt more at one with the social-democratic welfare state.
Another trip highlight was visiting the LEGO House by BIG Architects. I could deploy every adjective in the architecture-student arsenal to describe it, but honestly, it was just so much damn fun. I made LEGO flowers and stuck my hands wrist deep into giant containers of the bricks. It wasn’t really a stop about architecture. The building itself became almost insignificant (sorry Bjarke) because there was a life-size T. rex made of plastic bricks in front of me. The whole thing could have been housed in a warehouse and had the same effect, which is perhaps the meanest compliment I could give a BIG project but I think Bjarke has enough revenue to cushion the blow. Legendary stop, would highly recommend.
The rest of the trip was spent in a whirlwind series of guided walking tours. Me and walking tours have a complicated relationship. I genuinely want to love them: in theory, there is nothing more appealing than being led through a city by someone who understands it. In practice, the moment a tour guide begins speaking, my body, seemingly independent of my mind, interprets the situation as a medical emergency requiring the immediate conservation of energy. My eyelids get heavy, my knees hurt, and even the most remarkable building begins to feel like an obstacle between me and literally anything else. This is particularly embarrassing because the problem is almost never the tour, and as an architecture student I need to have the skill to walk slowly and listen. I think it is the passivity of being told where to look and when to move, apparently, my curiosity requires the illusion that I discovered everything myself. So I am trying to approach guided tours as a kind of Zen practice. It's not going well, I am so stubborn, but I am trying more to simply stand where I am told and look. I did not reach enlightenment on this trip, in fact I actually fell asleep sitting up in an Arne Jacobsen chair during a city hall tour. Thankfully I have a week's worth of guided tours in Amsterdam on our Long Study Tour to look forward to, so hopefully progress will have been made by then. I'll keep you posted.
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