JACOBSEN, ARNE EMIL

JACOBSEN, ARNE EMIL (1902–1971), Danish architect. Jacobsen was born and educated in Copenhagen. When he was a student, neoclassicism dominated Danish architecture, but Jacobsen's meetings with Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe at exhibitions in Paris and Germany had an enormous effect on his work. His first houses, inspired by Le Corbusier, caused a sensation, and in 1936 he designed and built a series of housing units with staggered perspectives giving all the apartments a good view and a share of sun and light. This established him as Denmark's leading architect. After World War II the Søholme housing scheme established him internationally. He refused to specialize, and designed a wide variety of buildings, including town halls, a stadium, office blocks, and private houses. In 1959, he began to build St. Catherine's College, Oxford. During the same period he completed the famous SAS block in Copenhagen for Scandinavian Air System (1960), using glass curtain walls. In this building and in others Jacobsen designed also the furnishings and appurtenances. From 1956 he was professor of architecture at the Copenhagen Academy of Arts. His works are generally unspectacular and human in scale, and are characterized by refinement in siting, proportion, and detail, and by a sensitive use of materials. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: T. Faber, Arne Jacobsen (1964); J. Pedersen, Arkitekten Arne Jacobsen (1954). (Julius Margolinsky)