good better Best?
The order of tradition
The word "Bedre" in the name of the National Association of Better Building Practices indicates that something is better than something else - it establishes a norm. The word "custom" refers to tradition as in "customs and use", but also to order as in "putting custom on" something. Tradition and order are central concepts in the association's architectural program. The concepts were expressed in the association's efforts to find a form of architectural validity that lay beyond the individual or the random, in what we call "taste".
The original ideologue of the Landsforeningen Bedre Byggeskik, the architect PV Jensen-Klint (1853-1930), attached the greatest importance to the building cultural order that was in the tradition. Through generations of craftsmen and builders, the technical and aesthetic norms had been handed down through the ordinary buildings, so that the norms had been incorporated not only into the building culture, but into the national culture as a whole. The technical norms – the craftsmanship, and the aesthetic norms – the sense of beauty, were conditioned by a number of different factors – e.g. of the appropriateness of the use, of the naturally present building materials, of the landscape and of the climate.
In the norms of tradition, PV Jensen-Klint found the architectural and educational program that was to form the basis for the activities of the National Association of Better Building Practices: "In connection with the old house forms, create house types that can be used without major changes by practical builders who know the requirements of our time and aspires not to any species of Originality, but to all species of Solidarity. The art of repetition is of as great value as that of innovation, it belongs to the craftsman and cannot be satisfactorily practiced by others, renewal belongs to the artist and can only be properly done through him. Repetition creates Perfection in everyday life, Renewal Perfection through the Ages.” (At the Technical Society's General Assembly on 27 May 1909 published in the book Bygmesterskolen 1911).
The order of the 'beautiful form'
During the association's first 10 years, the architect Harald Nielsen (1886-1980) as teacher, editor and leader of Tegnehjælpen came to play a larger and larger role in the association's ideological work, and in the last several years he was the absolute center of the association. For Harald Nielsen, the concept of order was extended to something universally human, a kind of primordial human sense of beauty, an impression of pleasure evoked by the 'beautiful form'. The beautiful form in architecture was to be achieved by the fact that the constructive order of a building was simple and easy to read and could thereby satisfy a "primitive and basic sense of weight" in humans. Aesthetics was based on a fixed easily understandable order extracted from a constructive reason. In this way, the National Association for Better Construction tried to connect aesthetics with reason.
According to Harald Nielsen, architecture was a world language that had its origins in nature. He regarded the sense of beauty in human creations as an unconscious imitation of nature's creations - even of nature itself: "Skeletal buildings in the animal and plant world, symmetrical cell buildings in organisms, have their clumsy imitations in the art of architecture." (Bygmesterbogen 1932 p.275). The natural law of architecture was an organic concept of order, where there was a natural connection between aesthetics and simple measurement conditions, and here symmetry was the simplest, but also most elegant, form of the naturally determined concept of order. Beauty was equal to order for the National Association of Better Construction.
Originally, the National Association for Better Building Construction arose as an aesthetic reaction to 'tastelessness', and defining and justifying 'good taste' continued to be the association's driving force. With the association's focus on the builders and their practical background, the association had to legitimize the good taste by justifying the aesthetics with reason. As time went on, it became more difficult to combine the association's concepts of beauty in a building's appearance with reason in a building's function. As the functions of the buildings became more and more complex, the symmetrical division into subjects, which was an almost invariable rule in the estimate form, became increasingly difficult to implement. In many cases, the order of the facade won over the functionality of the house.
Social aesthetic movement
In the Landsforeningen Bedre Byggeskik, a connection was seen between the social and the aesthetic order. They were of the conviction that through the sensual experience of aesthetics, a view of society could be communicated to the population. In the aesthetics lay an educational aspect; in an aesthetic order, a human and social order could be maintained. At the same time, the association hoped that the aesthetic revival would make the rural population more self-aware and "civilized", i.e. formed and thereby create an opportunity to improve the social conditions in rural areas. The rural population had to be animated for life in the new community of the welfare state by living in beautiful, harmonious houses without excessive decoration, houses that were well thought out and characterized by respect for good craftsmanship and solid materials, houses with a common idiom that extended beyond the individual.
The association strove to expand its area of work to not only be an education for craftsmen and builders, but to be a comprehensive general educational task, where resonance for the association's concepts of beauty had to be created in the general population. The population's lack of interest in and understanding of building culture was considered to be the biggest obstacle to achieving values in general construction. With this effort, the association joins the ranks of the so-called social aesthetic movements that were widespread in the transition between the 18th and 1900th centuries.
Like several other social aesthetic movements, the Landsforeningen Bedre Byggeskik was an expression of an anti-urban reaction to the industrialized society of the 1800th century. The country and nature were perceived as the authentic and the healthy, whereas the city was associated with the derelict and the corrupt. The Landsforeningen Bedre Byggeskik was the rural housing movement's answer to a better housing culture in industrial society; a similar civilizing desire for people and buildings lay in the labor movement's building associations and garden village associations that arose at the same time in the urban areas.
Functionalism
In the big city, however, the romantic idea of the importance of tradition and nature for building culture was quickly challenged by functionalism's sparkling faith in the future and the possibility of new building materials to create buildings that met the building and housing needs of modern society. Functionalism, which wanted to free itself from the technical, aesthetic and functional bonds of the past, distanced itself from the existing culture – the culture in which the Landsforeningen Bedre Byggeskik found its raison d'être. The functionalist architects wanted to wipe the slate clean and create a clean historyless style.
The National Association for Better Construction bravely took up the fight against the funk style, which the association considered to be as much fashion and as little function as the original "enemy" - the tasteless station towns. Despite this, Harald Nielsen recognized that there could be "simple and clean" architectural qualities in the Funkist buildings, which he assessed as "real Functionalism". It could be difficult to explain the obvious architectural qualities in e.g. architect Arne Jacobsen's own villa (built 1928-29 in Ordrup), but with descriptions such as: "The building's "open-air orientation" is a confident declaration of love for the Danish summer climate" the radicalism of international white modernism was tried to be tamed. In the association's later publications, it could no longer hold its own against the new expressions, and house types inspired by a modern idiom crept in, but the association did not deviate from its original ideas. This is evident from the following warning that followed the description of Arne Jacobsen's villa: "Modern architecture - without a defined style - requires the instinctive creativity of an artist, it is not the art of craftsmanship." (Harald Nielsen in Den 2den Bygmesterbog 1941).
Architecture and building practices
The association's ideologue PV Jensen-Klint, who consistently titled himself Builder, regarded his program as a democratization of building culture. He harbored a great dislike for the "academic" architects who, through the style of historicism architecture, had betrayed the country's culture with their "abstract devilry": The culture of beauty belonged to the Academy. Once the peasants and the citizens and the artisans owned their fair share of it; let them recover what is theirs.” In the National Association for Better Building Practices, he saw a movement in which the trainees and the internship were at the fore.
It is symptomatic that most of PV Jensen-Klint's own projects are far more expressive and experimental than the ideals he put forward for the association's types. Because what PV Jensen-Klint described in 1911 was a reciprocity between architecture and building practice – between architect and craftsman. The problem for the National Association of Better Construction was simply that the most visionary architects with artistic drive lost interest in the association, which slowly came to a standstill. Originality came to be lacking in the association's projects, which congealed into a fixed and familiar form. The art of repetition alone could not maintain – let alone create – new house types that could serve as an architectural model – as type.
