December, 2016 | Jens Christian Top

In the USSR

by jenschristiantop.com 21st December 2016 in Culture Scapes 0 comments

In the summer 1971 I joined a group travel to Moscow and Leningrad – now Sct. Petersburg. The sidewalks of both cities were often full of pedestrians. This slide is taken a late afternoon in Alexander Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad. The slope leads to an underpass below Sadovaya Street, and the people in the picture are citizens of the USSR.

Grandma in Frederiksberg

by jenschristiantop.com 13th December 2016 in Culture Scapes 0 comments

Some years ago I found this 3 inch high picture in one of my grandma´s photo albums. The text was: Julie Jørgensen, November 1913. Usually she had written the location. Maybe she even did not know it herself? In November 1913 she was in training as a nurse at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen – then a new hospital for all the population of Denmark. I wondered where the picture was taken. If it was in Copenhagen, I found the atmosphere to be Strandvejen, Hellerup. It was not – so I thought, that it could be hard to find out, and that it would take too much time to solve the problem. So I gave up. Yesterday i came across the picture again, and I asked my intuition about the location. I saw an atmosphere of Gl. Kongevej, Frederiksberg. What about going through Gl. Kongevej by help of Google Street View? I did – and bingo! What a triumph! The building in the background is still existing at the corner of Gammel Kongevej and H.C. Ørsteds Vej. The signs are not the same, and the windows have become dark, but the building is just the same.

Householders

by jenschristiantop.com 7th December 2016 in Architecture, Culture Scapes, Humor 0 comments

Two strong and naked men are holding the corner of a tenement house in Fredericia, Denmark. The scene is from 1997, and the building was erected in 1905.

Colonnade

by jenschristiantop.com 2nd December 2016 in Architecture, Culture Scapes 0 comments

As an alternative and opposition to a local plan from 1988 for a new national football stadium in Copenhagen, where the main idea was to turn the stadium 90 degrees, three guys – Palle Bondrup, Albin P. Nielsen and myself – created and proposed a model for a new stadium, that was not turned the 90 degrees. The reason for turning the stadium was, that the boulevard Øster Allé was too close to the stadium. We thought, that it might be possible to build a tribune with spectator seats above Øster Allé. The only way to prove that it could be done, was to create a model – in this case a scale 1:200 model. The Polaroid photo shows how the alternative plan creates a tunnel and colonnade at Øster Allé. Our main reason not to turn the stadium was, that a 90 degree turn of the stadium would come too close to Lægeforeningens Boliger – a protected residential construction from 1854 – and shade the buildings and the outdoor areas from the sun. Our alternative was of course not accepted. In 1992 a stadium – turned 90 degrees – was inaugurated with a football match between the newly crowned European champions, Denmark and the reigning world […]

Retrieving dog

by jenschristiantop.com 1st December 2016 in Animals 0 comments

In 1997 the golden retriever Vesterland´s Wanda brought me a pheasant, while I exposed a film in seconds.