TikTok calls it “the church from Shrek.” Architecture calls it a masterpiece

2002. At the seventy-fourth Academy Awards ceremony, Shrek wins the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Not only because it revolutionized animation as we knew it, the Disney kind; not only because of its use of technology, which made the textures of clothes look so real; not only because it invented a double layer capable of speaking simultaneously to children and adults, and not even only because it had enlisted some of the biggest actors of the moment — like Eddie Murphy and Cameron Diaz — to voice its characters.

What everyone appreciated most about Shrek was the endless quantity of references the film managed to contain. From citations of great cinema to the hacking of Disney characters and narratives, all the way to places. Beyond the invented ones — like the house in the swamp, which today actually exists and can even be rented through Airbnb — the film also features real spaces, reinterpreted and distorted. Above all, the hill with the giant Hollywood sign, transformed into Far Far Away, Fiona’s family kingdom, with its boulevard filled with luxury boutiques and fast-food chains: Versarchery, Armani Armoury, Burger Prince, Farbucks.

But there is also a church. It really exists, it is not particularly well known, and in the film it is altered just enough not to be immediately recognizable. Yet today TikTok is full of people saying: “I went to the church from Shrek.”

In 1913, a competition was launched to celebrate the memory of the Danish pastor Nicolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig by building a church on the hill of Bispebjerg, a suburb of Copenhagen. It was won by the architect Peder Vilhelm Jensen Klint and, between 1921 and 1940, Grundtvig’s Church was built using around six million handmade yellow bricks.

Two intertwined roots coexist within the building. On one side, the dimensions and proportions of a Gothic cathedral: the Latin cross plan, the broad naves punctuated by enormous pillars — each made of thirty thousand bricks — and the pattern of ribs sculpting the pointed arches, illuminated by natural light entering through the tall openings in the walls. On the other, the typical features of a Danish country church, recognizable in the material, the construction techniques and the famous stepped gable.

The metaphor of the Trinity also runs continuously through the building: three are the peaks of the façade, three the entrances on each side. In the absolute absence of decoration, what stands out instead are the two organs, one from 1940 and one from 1965, including the largest organ pipe in all of Scandinavia, eleven meters high.

Not everyone at the time was convinced by the choice of site. Worshippers considered the church too remote, too peripheral. They were wrong: the building was simply waiting for a neighborhood to grow around it. And Jensen Klint ended up designing it himself. The architect transformed the classicist urban scheme imagined by planners into something more irregular, medieval and breathable. He even overturned the logic of heights: where the original plan wanted buildings to grow taller as they approached the church, he did the opposite. Low houses all around, so the monument could stand out without competition. The resulting neighborhood still bears traces of the church everywhere today: in the stepped gables, the yellow bricks, the rhythm of the façades.

Jensen Klint died in 1930, before seeing the work completed. First his son Kaare, and later his grandson Esben, carried it forward. Grundtvig’s Church was thus built under the guidance of three generations of the same family. On September 8, 1940, the King of Denmark consecrated the church, almost twenty years after the laying of the first stone. He also consecrated one of the most significant manifestations of Brick Expressionism, the movement born in Northern Europe as a response to German Expressionism. Eighty years later, TikTok is rediscovering it.

Opening image: Photo Valentina Solano