Grundtvig's Church
— — a village church the size of a cathedral.
Not only on a wall.
“A Lutheran parish church of pale yellow brick on a hill in Bispebjerg, north of central Copenhagen. P.V. Jensen-Klint won the design competition in 1913 and laid the first brick in 1921; his son Kaare finished the work after his death, opening the nave in 1940. The west façade is a stepped gable from a Danish village church, scaled to forty-nine metres. From the studio, the place reads as light on brick, in the key of a country that prefers quiet.
Grundtvig's Church, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Grundtvigs Kirke stands in the Bispebjerg district of Copenhagen, about five kilometres north of the city centre. It is a parish church of the Lutheran Church of Denmark, named for Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, the nineteenth-century theologian, hymn-writer, and educational reformer whose work shaped modern Danish identity. Construction began on Grundtvig's birthday, the 8th of September 1921, and the nave was consecrated on the same date in 1940. The west tower rises to 49 metres. The surrounding terraced housing, also designed by Jensen-Klint, completes the parish as a planned ensemble.
The church is built almost entirely of a single material: hand-formed yellow Danish brick, of roughly six million units. There is no carved stone ornament, no figural sculpture, no stained glass. The west façade is a stepped gable abstracted from rural Danish village churches and enlarged to cathedral scale. P.V. Jensen-Klint, a self-taught architect with a background in engineering and craft, treated the building as an essay in vernacular form. After his death in 1930, his son Kaare Klint and grandson Esben Klint completed the interior, keeping the discipline of one material throughout.
Inside, the nave is white. Tall, slender brick piers carry pointed arches up to a vaulted ceiling roughly twenty-two metres above the floor. Light enters through narrow vertical windows in the clerestory and floods the upper bay; below, the church reads almost monochrome. The acoustic is long — about seven seconds of reverberation — which is why the building is regularly used for choral concerts. The 1940 Marcussen organ stands on the west gallery. The light shifts more than the building; in winter the nave is darker, and the brick holds the colour of the day.