If you drive out of Denmark, across the Øresund Bridge into Sweden, you’ll immediately notice two things.
One, there are a lot fewer bicycles, even in big cities like Stockholm and Malmö that have bicycle lanes. Sweden’s more of a car country.
Two, you’ll see small wooden houses all over the countryside, almost always painted red. The red is called Falun Red, and the iron that makes it red was originally a byproduct of the local copper mines.
The wood for the houses comes from Sweden’s big forests.
Denmark doesn’t have many wooden houses. Its forests are small.
What Denmark has is brick. The Danish brick.
95% of Danish houses have brick facades
About 95% of Danish single-family houses have brick facades, and so do most Danish churches, and schools, and city halls. Sometimes the bricks are hidden behind whitewashing, but they’re still there.
The brick’s only real competition is concrete. The new apartment blocks going up in the trendy cities often have concrete facades, but even there, developers sometimes cover those facades with flat little tiles that look like bricks.
Bricks were known as monk stones
Danish people like bricks.
And this affection goes all the way back to the 12th century, when bricks were known as monk stones, munkesten, because it was primarily monks who made them. Denmark had a lot of cloisters and monasteries at the time.
Munkesten, monk stones, are bigger bricks, almost the size of a shoebox, and they were all made by hand. The monks would press clay into wooden molds and then fire them in kilns fueled by giant stacks of wood.
Bricks nearly a thousand years old
Monk stones are mostly red, from the red clay that is the upper layer of clay in Danish ground.
Red was considered the high-end brick color for centuries.
Ribe Cathedral, in Jutland near Germany has red brick munkesten, and so does Roskilde Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage site where Danish monarchs are buried.
The older parts of these buildings are made with red monk bricks that are nearly a thousand years old.
Red brick vs yellow brick
Red brick is not just beautiful. It represents stability, and trust, and prestige.
But Denmark has another type of brick. Yellow brick. The clay comes from a deeper layer underground, and it’s actually grey, but it turns yellow when you fire it.
For many centuries, it was the low-rent brick. If you made yellow bricks, you used them in less-visible parts of the building and put your good red stuff out front.
But around the 1930s, this changed. Architects started to be loud and proud with their yellow brick.
It started with Aarhus University, then in its start-up phase. It needed low-cost buildings. A local brick company offered 1 million yellow bricks free of charge.
The architects accepted. They created a beautiful, cohesive campus with yellow bricks and yellow tiles that is still in use today.
The church with 6 million bricks
At around the same time yellow bricks were used for Grundtvig’s Church, a huge gothic expressionist church on top of Bispebjerg Hill in Copenhagen.
It’s made of almost 6 million yellow bricks.
The altar, the pulpit, the floor, everything’s brick, and a lot of the bricks were hand-sanded to give them a soft, light-reflecting feel. It’s an amazing space.
Mixing red and yellow bricks
Yellow bricks became common for housing projects, and schools, and single-family houses.
Fast forward to the present day, contemporary Danish architects like to mix yellow and red bricks, for example Vejle Fjordenhus, the modern “water castle” in Vejle Fjord (it’s really offices and a restaurant).
Or Bispebjerg Bakke, the undulating ‘snake building’ apartments in Copenhagen Northwest.
Recycling bricks
And it’s become trendy to recycle bricks.
Denmark has at least four big brick libraries. These are private companies that take bricks from buildings that have been torn down for whatever reason, clean them up, and save them to be used in new buildings.
Sometimes builders also just take bricks directly from a demolition site to a construction site.
In my neighborhood, the municipality recently tore down a brick wall around a cemetery, then moved the bricks a couple streets away and used them to build a training center at the local hospital. It looks great.
Training center made with recycled bricks at Bispebjerg Hospital, Copenhagen
Bricklayer education takes 4-5 years
Denmark recycles bricks not because it is a poor country, but because it is practical country.
Making bricks is not very environmentally friendly, it takes a lot of heat to fire them, but once they’re made, they can be used and re-used almost indefinitely.
This, of course, requires skilled bricklayers, and Denmark has a lot of respect for bricklayers.
The bricklayer education can take 4 to 5 years, including an apprenticeship to a master bricklayer.
Once fully trained, a unionized bricklayer, or mason, makes about $50 an hour working for someone else, or potentially much more when she owns her own business.
Female bricklayer won competition 3 years in a row
I say her own business not because most bricklayers are female, most are not, but because the most famous bricklayer in Denmark is a woman in her twenties.
Gry Astrup Hansen, a fourth-generation mason, won the Danish national bricklaying skills championship three years in a row and competed internationally in bricklaying.
She now owns her own company and advocates for getting more women into the building trades.
Buns are still an equalizer
Denmark needs good bricklayers. It is one of the trades currently on the Danish immigration authority’s Positive List, along with electricians and aircraft technicians.
Having a skill on the positive list makes it easier for non-EU citizens to get a work permit for Denmark, although you still need a job offer from a Danish employer.
Buns are still an equalizer
While Denmark is importing bricklayers, it is exporting bricks, especially to Norway, Sweden, and Germany.
Denmark makes 300 million bricks per year, and it can’t use them all. Exporting bricks is part of exporting Danish design.
And that is why the Danish brick is featured in the Danish Architecture Center’s permanent exhibit So Danish!
I encourage you to go see it and to get the English audio guide. When you turn it on, you may recognize the voice – it’s me.