ABSTRACT
Arne Jacobsen was one of Denmark’s leading twentieth century architects until his untimely death in 1971. His town hall in Aarhus, which he won in competition with Erik Moller in 1937, was his first major civic building project and his radical reinterpretation of the building type proved shocking to the town’s citizens. Like most other Scandinavian cities, Aarhus had grown dramatically as industrialisation swept through the Baltic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and as Denmark’s second city and a major port, it required additional, enlarged and replacement public buildings to respond. Aarhus remains an effective and highly regarded political and civic centre for the city, indeed despite the architects’ focus on providing a flexible structure, it is little changed from its original form. By the time of Aarhus’s completion in 1942, Jacobsen had won and built a further town hall in Sollerod with Flemming Lassen, his old partner from the ‘House for the Future’.
