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

In the center of Copenhagen, on the sixth floor of the Royal Hotel, Room 606 preserves the definitive masterwork of the Danish architect and designer Arne Jacobsen, in microcosm. Room 606 is the only surviving interior of the SAS House; the combined luxury hotel and satellite air terminal that Jacobsen designed for the Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) and completed in 1960.

The SAS House was the most complete commission of Jacobsen’s career, in which he exercised the full range of his talents as a designer of furniture, lamps, textiles, gardens, tableware and graphics. As the fragment that encapsulates the basic ideas of the whole building, Room 606 provides a lens for reconstructing Jacobsen’s vanished masterwork in words and images.

Richly illustrated with nearly 500 photographs and drawings, this book guides the reader on a virtual tour through the Royal Hotel and SAS Air Terminal as they stood in 1960. Along the way, the author reveals the connections between the SAS House and Jacobsen’s earlier buildings and objects. As a result, the tour that begins in Room 606 provides a general introduction to Jacobsen’s career.

Based on his ongoing study of modern Nordic architecture, Michael Sheridan has developed ideas established in his 2003 cult classic―also titled Room 606 and long out of print―to arrive at a fresh perspective on Arne Jacobsen’s life’s work. Using new text and images, Sheridan reveals the essence of Jacobsen’s creative practice, in which he employed technology to heighten the presence of nature.