Grundtvig's Church

Before you think about history, look at the colour. The whole building is one warm, pale yellow, the shade of old butter or late-afternoon sand. Every surface is brick. The steps, the walls and the tall pointed gable are all made of the same small rectangles. Stand close and you can see the fine lines of mortar running in straight rows. The walls rise in long vertical ridges, like folded paper. They look a little like the pipes of a giant organ.

You are standing in front of Grundtvig's Church. It sits on a low hill in the Bispebjerg district of northwest Copenhagen, a short ride from Frederiksberg. Many visitors are surprised by how quiet it is up here. There is no grand square or wide boulevard. Low yellow houses circle the church instead. Children cycle past and neighbours walk their dogs. The church does not feel like a monument to visit. It feels like a building that belongs to a neighbourhood, and that was very much the intention.

The church is a memorial to one man, Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig. He was a nineteenth-century Danish pastor, poet and thinker. Few people outside Denmark know his name, but inside the country his influence is everywhere. He wrote a very large number of hymns, and Danes still sing many of them today. He also inspired the folk high schools. These are informal schools for adults, with no exams, built around conversation, song and shared life. Grundtvig believed in ordinary people and their own language.

After his death, people began to plan a lasting memorial. In the early twentieth century, a design competition was held, and the winner was the architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint. He was an unusual figure. He trained first as an engineer and came to architecture later in life. He loved the plain brick village churches of the Danish countryside. Many of them have stepped gables, which are end walls that climb in stairs toward a point. He wanted to raise that humble form to the scale of a cathedral.

Now look up at the west front again with that idea in mind. You can see the stepped gable of a country church, stretched tall and repeated in sharp vertical lines. Architects often call the style Expressionist. That word describes early twentieth-century design that aimed for emotion and strong shapes instead of copying older styles exactly. Here the Gothic pointed arch is still present. But the decoration has been stripped away. Only the brick, the rhythm and the height remain.

The building took a very long time to finish. Construction began in the early 1920s and continued for almost two decades. The church was consecrated in 1940, during the dark first year of the German occupation of Denmark. Jensen-Klint did not live to see it. He died in 1930, and his son, Kaare Klint, completed the work. So the church you see is the work of a father and a son. It took the better part of a lifetime to build.

The number of bricks is often given as about six million. That figure is widely repeated, and it gives a sense of the patience involved. Every brick was laid by hand. The craftsmen worked with very careful, regular joints. The quality of the bricklaying is part of the design itself. There is no plaster to hide mistakes and no paint to cover a rough wall. What you see is exactly how it was built, course after course, by skilled hands.

When you step inside, the first thing you notice is the height and the light. The nave rises in tall pointed arches, and everything is the same pale yellow brick. The pillars, the vaults and the floor all match. There are no painted saints and no gold altarpiece filling the walls. Daylight comes through clear windows and falls softly across the brick. Many visitors fall silent here without being asked. The space feels huge, yet calm and plain.

Here is a detail that many people miss. Look down at the seating. Instead of long wooden pews, the church uses rows of simple chairs. Kaare Klint designed them himself. They have light wooden frames and woven seats. The design is now known as a classic of Danish furniture, and it is still made today. Kaare Klint is often called the father of modern Danish furniture design. So a small part of a much larger story starts right here, in these quiet rows.

The second surprise is outside, in the houses around you. The low yellow homes that circle the church were planned together with it. They follow the same architectural thinking and use the same warm brick. Church and housing were meant to form one community on the hill. This links back to Grundtvig's own ideas. He wanted faith and everyday life to sit side by side. Here, people live in the shadow of the memorial, and the memorial looks after the street.

It also matters that this is a working parish church, not a museum. Services, weddings, funerals and concerts take place here. The acoustics in the tall brick space are full and long, and organ music fills the room easily. If you are lucky, you may hear a rehearsal or a choir while you visit. Please move gently and speak quietly if a service or ceremony is in progress. For local people, this is first of all a place of worship and of song.

Think about the contrast between the scale and the simplicity. Many great churches in Europe were built to show the power of kings or bishops. This one honours a poet who wrote for farmers, schoolchildren and congregations. Its material is the most ordinary building material in Denmark. Its shape comes from the small churches of villages. In that sense, the building carries Grundtvig's ideas in its walls. It takes something common and makes it tall and serious.

Before you leave, walk slowly around the outside. Watch how the light changes on the brick as the sun moves. In the morning it can look pale and cool. Late in the day it turns golden and almost glows. Notice the sharp shadows that the vertical ridges cast across the front. Listen to the quiet streets around you, and the bicycles passing by the yellow houses. As you walk down the hill, turn back once. Look at the gable rising above the rooftops, a village church grown to the height of a cathedral.