Room 606: The Sas House and the Work of Arne Jacobsen

This text reconstructs a building that no longer exists, in order to rediscover a lost world of beauty and sensation and gain a new insight into the work of Danish architect Arne Jacobsen. That building is the SAS House, a luxury hotel and airline terminal completed in Copenhagen in 1960. Designed for the Scandinavian Airlines System at the dawn of the jet age, the SAS House was Jacobsen's masterpiece, a cumulative work that condensed the architectural strategies and formal devices of a lifetime into a single example of total design. The SAS House has been reduced to a shadow of its original condition. While the building is still used as a hotel and ticketing office, the distinctive interiors and fixtures that were an integral part of Jacobsen's masterwork have been discarded or altered beyond recognition. However, on the sixth floor of the hotel tower, a single guest room remains in its original condition, with the built-in woodwork, furniture, custom fabrics and surfaces that Jacobsen created for the 275 rooms of the SAS Royal Hotel. Room 606 is a microcosm of the larger building, and, examined in detail, provides the key to understanding the SAS House and, by extension, the underlying themes of Jacobsen's entire career. This book presents a very distinct way of looking at an architect's work, using the time capsule room 606 as a lens through which to examine Jacobsen's entire career. This is reflected in the structure of the book. The chapters are organized thematically, and each is articulated into three sections, which examine each theme as it applies to room 606, the SAS House, and Jacobsen's entire work. This structure is emphasized by the design as well as the visual material, which are also articulated in the same tripartite way. This structure and insight into the Danish architect's work is brought alive by a wealth of visual material, including a stunning collection of black-and-white images taken shortly after the completion of the SAS House by renowned architectural photographer Aage Struwing, who collaborated with Jacobsen for more than two decades; a portfolio of specially commissioned colour photographs by Paul Warchol that underline the contemporaneity of room 606; as well as original sketches and architectural drawings, many of which have never been published.