File:Kay fisker, mødrehjælpen, copenhagen 1953-1955 (4037012544).jpg

mødrehjælpen, adminstration and accommodation, copenhagen, denmark 1953-1955. architect: kay fisker, 1893-1965.

view from the north. stitch of two photos. early spring.

(for hagen and boris)

going through hagen stier's photos of arne jacobsen's HEW headquarters in hamburg, I was reminded of this late fisker building which is just down the street from where I live. jacobsen's essay in elegant abstraction is usually compared to an earlier office building in düsseldorf, and with good reason: jacobsen had a tendency to work with known modernist typologies, but here is an even earlier example and closer to home too, so to speak.

jacobsen and fisker were both prominent at the royal academy in copenhagen at the time, fisker being the most influential locally while jacobsen patiently made an international name for himself. few people know that jacobsen worked for fisker back in the 1920's. fisker wanted jacobsen for his uncanny watercolour renderings, jacobsen wanted a career of his own. their collaboration was predictably brief.

there is a silence about fisker's houses with their traditional roofline, the unassuming greyish yellow brickwork and the repetitive window patterns, yet they grow on you. and as true architecture, they resist bracketing.

certainly, his critics and apologists alike would have found confirmation in a building like this: the Swedish empiricists argued that fisker was an ice-cold formalist; the regionalists loved him for his ability to create a grounded, local modernism, but so did the nazis; and the proponents of analoge architektur, his latest followers, wet themselves over the 1950's scandinavian melancholia and all the repressed longing that can be hidden behind identical square windows...

they would be only too right. the mødrehjælpen building, impossible to pronounce for anyone outside denmark, is also a monument to the paternalism of the welfare state, and a reminder of the poverty and traditionalist values of postwar copenhagen.

the institution was built to advise and support mothers, not least the young and unmarried. they would come hoping for an abortion but that was rarely on offer and they were often forced to seek humiliating and dangerous illegal treatment. pregnant housewives from the slums of central copenhagen were offered freudian analysis if they were overcome with fear at the prospect of one more mouth to feed. the intentions were good, the means were at times horrific, though it must be said in defense of the early welfare state that once the women had accepted giving birth, the institutionalized aid proved its worth.

free access to abortion would later alleviate many social ills but not solve the central issue of a woman's right to decide over her own body, a question so central to misogynistic, traditional societies that it will always be a defining tenet for the modern state. after all, you can be coersed into a free abortion, a situation depressingly easy to imagine. the final challenge was to remove all stigma from single motherhood, only the single moms can tell us how far we have come.