Grundtvig's Church — church building
Unknown author · Public domain

Grundtvig's Church

  • 1 min read
  • 55.717° N 12.534° E

Interesting facts

  • Its west organ, built in 1965 with 55 stops, has a 425-kilogram, 32-foot pipe described as the longest organ pipe in Scandinavia.
  • Kaare Klint designed the church's chairs, a design that later became famous worldwide as a dining chair.
  • The tower part was consecrated in 1927, thirteen years before the whole church was finished in 1940.
  • The foundation stone was laid on 8 September 1921, and the finished church was consecrated on the same date in 1940.
  • The tower rises 49 metres, and the central nave is vaulted 22 metres above the floor.
  • The church is 76 metres long and 35 metres wide, including its side aisles.
  • Jensen-Klint also designed the low yellow-brick housing built around the church in 1924–1926.
  • The baptismal font is carved from Faxe limestone, and a seven-branched candlestick in gilded oak stands on the altar.
  • Esben Klint, of the next generation of the Klint family, designed the great organ and the chandeliers.

Why it is worth it

The building is a monument to a man most visitors have never heard of. N.F.S. Grundtvig was a 19th-century Danish theologian, poet and educator whose ideas about folk schools and national identity shaped modern Denmark more than most of its kings did — enough that when a competition opened in 1913 to design a church in his memory, it was understood from the start that the building itself would have to say something about who he was.

Architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint won that competition, but he wouldn't live to see his design finished. Construction began in 1921 and dragged on for nineteen years, and when Jensen-Klint died in 1930 the site was only partway built. His son, Kaare Klint — already an established designer in his own right — took over supervision of the project and carried it through to completion in 1940, finishing his father's church a decade after his father could no longer see it rise.

The material choice was deliberate rather than economical: around six million yellow bricks, all sourced from the island of Zealand, went into a façade that Jensen-Klint modelled on the stepped gables of ordinary Danish village churches — the kind of building Grundtvig himself would have known. Stacked and repeated at monumental scale, those gables read from a distance as something closer to the pipes of a giant church organ, which is usually the detail people notice before anyone tells them what they're looking at.

Getting there

4 km from Frederiksberg. Copenhagen Kastrup Airport (CPH) is about 13 km away.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Capital Region of Denmark 11The Most Beautiful Places in Denmark 18The Most Beautiful Sacred Places in Denmark 5The Most Beautiful Churches 186The Most Beautiful Sacred Places 623

From the encyclopaedia

Grundtvig's Church is located in the Bispebjerg district of Copenhagen, Denmark. It is a rare example of expressionist church architecture. Due to its originality, it is one of the best known churches in the city.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

55.71658, 12.53361per Wikidata