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Room 606: The Sas House and the Work of Arne Jacobson

An intriguing look at the work of Danish architect and furniture designer Arne Jacobsen (1902-71) through a detailed study of his masterwork, the SAS House in Copenhagen, completed in 1960. Divided into chapters that examine Room 606, the only preserved area of the hotel and a 'time-capsule' of exquisite woodwork, furnishings, and custom fabrics and colour palette. Rediscovers a lost world of mid-20th century form and sensation through hundreds of rare archival photographs, original drawings and sketches, and specially commissioned, new colour photographs of Room 606.

For the first time in the history of the Venice Biennale, two national pavilions will merge to present one single exhibition. The Danish Art Council‘s Committee for International Visual Arts and the Nordic Committee are honoured to announce that the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset will curate both the Danish and the Nordic Pavilions at the Giardini, with a show titled ‘The Collectors’ stretching across the two neighbouring venues. Together with a selection of invited international artists, Elmgreen & Dragset will transform the existing architecture of the two pavilions into domestic settings, and invite the audience to be guests in a homely ambience. Here, dining rooms and bedrooms, furniture, fireplaces, a stained glass skylight and the artworks nestled within the households will reveal the uncanny stories of various fictional inhabitants, their obsessive characters and their diverse lifestyles.

The public will be guided on a tour by a real estate agent through a ‘For Sale’ Danish Pavilion, and will be told the story of the Ingmar Bergman-style family dramas that used to haunt this house. A long swimming pool will lead the visitors to the neighbouring Nordic Pavilion – a flamboyant bachelor's pad. Inside they will encounter the domestic remnants of the mysterious Mister B, and be met by a group of young male hustlers sipping vodka tonics in an environment that could be a case study house motif taken from a David Hockney painting.

As the title of the show indicates, the curators will approach the topic of collecting, and the psychology behind the practice of expressing oneself through physical objects. Why do we gather items and surround ourselves with them in our every day lives? Which mechanisms of desire trigger our selection? The selected artworks, alongside the interior design, kitchenware, clothing and even a collection of flies, will compose the complex narratives of this double exhibition. Through the house decor and the collection of artworks, the garments in the wardrobes, the porcelain in the kitchen and the books in the library, the identities of the fictional inhabitants, their passions and melancholy, will emerge piece by piece.

‘The Collectors’ is not a group show in the conventional sense. The pavilions will undergo a radical reconstruction, and more than twenty artists and designers of all ages, ranging from established to emerging ones, will contribute to creating a different kind of exhibition format, one that will appear closer to a film set than a conventional art display. The curators aim to establish a unique atmosphere of intimacy with their staged exhibition – one that can run counter to the official spectacle and formal nature of the Biennale – and, in close collaboration with the participating artists and designers, they hope to circumvent all the usual competitive aspects of the larger art even

The Tietgenkollegiet by Lundgaard & Tranberg is one of my favourite new buildings in Orestad, Copenhagen. It may not be the most dramatic but it would seem to have formed a perfect little self-contained student community.

From Wikipedia : "Its concept focuses on how the accommodation can help encourage the personal and social development of the students. The courtyard, around which all common areas are located, reinforces the idea of community. It also enables the often monotonous student corridor to become not only spatially interesting but unending, linking all student ‘houses’ on each floor.

There are 360 rooms, 10% of which have been designated for international exchange students. The building is circular, with 6 floors and rooms set up in blocks of 12. Each room has its own washroom and there are four sizes to the rooms: 26 sq. metres, 29 sq. metres, 33 sq. metres, and 42 sq. metres, approximately. Each block has shared kitchen and living room, with each living room having a unique set of furniture and other items."

This text reconstructs a building that no longer exists, in order to rediscover a lost world of beauty and sensation and gain a new insight into the work of Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. That building is the SAS House, a luxury hotel and airline terminal completed in Copenhagen in 1960. Designed for the Scandinavian Airlines System at the dawn of the jet age, the SAS House was Jacobsen's masterpiece, a cumulative work that condensed the architectural strategies and formal devices of a lifetime into a single example of total design. The SAS House has been reduced to a shadow of its original condition. While the building is still used as a hotel and ticketing office, the distinctive interiors and fixtures that were an integral part of Jacobsen's masterwork have been discarded or altered beyond recognition. However, on the sixth floor of the hotel tower, a single guest room remains in its original condition, with the built-in woodwork, furniture, custom fabrics and surfaces that Jacobsen created for the 275 rooms of the SAS Royal Hotel. Room 606 is a microcosm of the larger building, and, examined in detail, provides the key to understanding the SAS House and, by extension, the underlying themes of Jacobsen's entire career. This book presents a very distinct way of looking at an architect's work, using the time capsule room 606 as a lens through which to examine Jacobsen's entire career. This is reflected in the structure of the book. The chapters are organized thematically, and each is articulated into three sections, which examine each theme as it applies to room 606, the SAS House, and Jacobsen's entire work. This structure is emphasized by the design as well as the visual material, which are also articulated in the same tripartite way. This structure and insight into the Danish architect's work is brought alive by a wealth of visual material, including a stunning collection of black-and-white images taken shortly after the completion of the SAS House by renowned architectural photographer Aage Struwing, who collaborated with Jacobsen for more than two decades; a portfolio of specially commissioned colour photographs by Paul Warchol that underline the contemporaneity of room 606; as well as original sketches and architectural drawings, many of which have never been published.