Dreams On Wheels

Jan Gehl’s work around the world May 2, 2009 at 09:59

Jan Gehl’s urban quality firm Gehl Architects, which he founded with Helle Søholt in 2000, is the world’s leading urban space planning company.

With 40 years of practice, Gehl has now transformed Copenhagen’s city centre into a bustling and lively pedestrian strip where shopping and entertainment go hand in hand with playfulness and environmental consciousness. Melbourne, London and now New York have also called upon the firm to help improve urban quality and re-emerge from the “car invasion”. Gehl’s methodology is unique and sharp and is anchored in statistical and sociological analysis.

Learn more through the Exhibit !

ABOUT GEHL ARCHITECTS : RESEARCH AS FOUNDATION

The work and further research of Gehl Architects is based on Jan Gehl’s four decades of extensive research carried out at The School of Architecture, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The research is the basis of worldwide urban quality consultancy and reflects Gehl Architects’ viewpoint that working in the public realm requires a multi-disciplinary approach, as the field of work encompasses not only architecture and planning but also psychology, anthropology and sociology to truly understand how people experience and use the city.

Life - Space - Buildings

Gehl Architects believe that a good city is one where attention is paid to human scale city planning. A city should open up, invite and include people, having different activities and possibilities and thereby ensuring multiplicity and diversity. To achieve this, design solutions are based on the close relationship between people’s natural use of the public space and the physical character and form of the built environment. Their design solutions begin with formulating a vision and comprehensive programme based on the type of life - its activities and attractions - that is inherent in a given area. The next step is to develop a public space network that can support public life through scale, form and climate. Finally we envision how buildings can contribute to our aspirations for public life in terms of height, massing and scale as well as their functions and interaction with the public realm.

Jan Gehl, b.1936

Jan Gehl is an Architect and Professor of Urban Design at the School of Architecture at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He is also the founding partner of Gehl Architects –Urban Quality Consultants. His research on public spaces and public life began in Copenhagen,but was quickly applied to many other cities in Europe, North America, Asia and Australia. His ideas and approaches to design for public spaces incorporate the cutting edge of technology without losing sight of what best supports and enhances people’s experience of everyday life in the public realm. In 1992, he received an honorary doctors degree from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. In 1993 he won the Sir Patrick Abercrombie Prize - for exemplary contributions to Town Planning and Territorial Development from the International Union of Architects, and in 1998 he received the EDRA/Places Research Award from the Environmental Design Research Association, USA. Jan Gehl is a Honorary Fellow of RIBA, The Royal British Institute of Architects, of AIA, American Institute of Architects and RAIC, Royal Architectural Institute of Canada. Gehl’s publications include Life between Buildings, Public Spaces- Public Life, and New Urban Spaces, which have been translated into multiple languages.