Grundtvig's Church

Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint won the competition to build a church commemorating the theologian and hymn writer N. F. S. Grundtvig, and construction ran from 1921 to 1940, finished by his son. The idea was to take the stepped gables of Danish village churches and push them to a monumental scale, and the west front rises in vertical bands that read like the pipes of an organ, forty-nine metres high. Everything is one material: about six million pale yellow bricks, hand-sorted for colour and laid by hand, inside and out, with no plaster, no stone dressing and almost no ornament, so the nave is a vaulted brick hall of extraordinary plainness and height. The surrounding housing was built in the same brick and by the same designers.

What you actually see

• The organ-pipe west front - stepped gables at forty-nine metres.
• A nave built only in brick - no plaster or stone anywhere inside.
• Six million hand-sorted bricks - the whole church in one material.
• The matching housing quarter - the surrounding blocks in the same brick.

When to go

Year round. One hour. Weekday mornings; the church closes to visitors during services and events, and hours are shorter on Sundays. The interior is best on a bright day when light rakes down the vaults.

Honest expectations

It is well outside the centre and takes half an hour to reach. Opening hours are limited and change seasonally, so check before travelling out. The interior is austere to the point that some visitors find it bleak. There are no facilities.

Nearby

Bispebjerg Cemetery is nearby; central Copenhagen is a bus ride south.