DAMPA_75_years_of_quiet_design_ENG - Flipbook - Page 91
Much like Lever House in New York and Castrol House in
London, the SAS Royal Hotel and terminal comprised a
horizontal podium block containing two lofty storeys of public and service spaces, out of the centre of which rose a
22-storey ‘skyscraper’ tower containing the bedrooms. The
podium was intended by Jacobsen to be read as a sandwich of horizontal layers, its ground floor being recessed
and entirely contained within non-load-bearing plate glass
panels. The first storey projects outward, giving shelter to
the pavements and appearing as a slim box, encased in
olive green metal panels interspersed by a continuous band
of ribbon windows. In contrast, the accommodation tower is
faced in glass curtain walling, the framing of which has a
vertical emphasis, its dimensions derived from the Golden
Ratio.
Although the hotel was the tallest building in central Copenhagen at that time, it has a remarkable lightness, its glazed
facings reflecting the changing sky, the colour subtly altering
depending on the quality of light, time of day and season of
the year.
Masterful as the exterior proved to be upon completion, it
was in Jacobsen’s designs for the interiors that his brilliantly
creative imagination became even more apparent. Whereas
the contemporary American-owned chain hotels of the Jet
Age – such as those of Hilton, Intercontinental and Sheraton
– tended to be flamboyantly ornamented, Jacobsen’s original designs cleverly succeeded in engendering a sense of
luxury through rigorous minimalism. In that sense, the hotel’s
interiors were unusually architectonic for their genre, continuing and building upon the visual language and meticulous
detailing of the exterior while introducing very fine materials
and finishes.
Through double sets of plate-glass sliding doors, guests
and visitors entered a huge rectangular lobby, entirely
floored in slabs of veined Greenland marble with walls mainly clad in rosewood except around the elevator lobby where
black polished marble with subtle white veining was used.
As these hard finishes were a recipe for cacophonous noise,
it was wise of Jacobsen to specify Dæmpa aluminium tiles
to clad the ceiling soffit. A further important architectural
benefit of these was that they could be spray-painted precisely to match the olive green colour of the podium’s external metal facing panels, the underside of the first floor
consequently appearing as a continuous surface, both
above the pavements and throughout the interior.
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