DAMPA_75_years_of_quiet_design_ENG - Flipbook - Page 117
Dæmpa’s project book for Danish commissions covering
the period 1967 to 1972 is the earliest still to survive in the
company’s records (previous equivalent books covering
1,651 project offers made between 1951 and 1966 having
been destroyed in a fire). The book records that offers were
made to 1,329 different customers over the six-year period.
Of these, 365 were for educational buildings ranging from
nurseries to universities, though the great majority were
schools, located in cities, towns and villages all over Denmark. 78 were for banks and 67 were for clinics and hospitals. Municipal buildings in Faaborg, Frederikssund,
Glamsbjerg, Helsinge, Kerteminde, Maribo, Nyborg, Nørre
Aaby, Tornved and Ølstykke also received Dæmpa ceilings,
as did the new city hall in Mainz in West Germany. A smaller
number were for industrial premises, clients including LEGO,
Coca Cola and Bang & Olufsen.
Among the diverse projects were some very significant
buildings and interiors designed by prominent architects –
for example a big extension to the Carlsberg brewery in
Copenhagen which Svenn Eske Kristensen designed in the
latter 1960s and which comprised offices, an 88-metre-high
silo for the storage of malt, a low-rise malting hall, plus a
space for delivery trucks to offload. Another was to supply
ceilings for the Copenhagen Regional Hospital (Københavns Amtssygehus) in Herlev by Gehrdt Bornebusch, Max
Brüel and Jørgen Selchau, inaugurated in 1976 and comprising a very extensive four-storey podium structure in
exposed reinforced concrete housing most of the patient
care, research and administration facilities with a 25-storey
tower adjacent containing the wards. The interiors were
remarkable for having psychedelically-coloured abstract
artworks by Poul Gernes installed throughout.
Also in the mid-1970s ceilings were provided for a new, additional campus for the University of Copenhagen at Amager
to the south of the city which Eva and Nils Koppel designed
and which housed the Faculty of Humanities. The most idiosyncratic design to which Dæmpa appear to have contributed was the Varna restaurant in Aarhus, the interior of which
was renovated in 1971 with an eye-popping colourful
scheme by the Danish-Swiss architect and furniture designer Verner Panton.
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