COWI Brand Guidelines: Christen Ostenfeld’s 1930 Office and Two Partners’ Initials

A Copenhagen engineer and a theatre on a deadline.

COWI began in Copenhagen in 1930, when the civil engineer Christen Ostenfeld set up on his own. The company says he was 29, had returned after six years working abroad, and started in a small flat in Vesterbro, then a working-class district; English Wikipedia says his years in France and Switzerland shaped the firm’s international outlook and its close ties with researchers. Danish Wikipedia gives the first name of the office as Dr.techn. Chr. Ostenfeld, Raadgivende Civilingeniør, a consulting civil engineer’s practice.

Its first notable job was the rebuilding of Copenhagen’s run-down Scala theatre in 1931. With a short deadline, the company says, Ostenfeld used prefabricated steel elements that made scaffolding unnecessary, and the new National Scala opened in less than a year. Prefabrication and long-span roofs became the practice’s specialities in the 1930s, and in 1935 it designed the Danish pavilion for the Brussels world’s fair, built from prefabricated Danish pine.

Bridges followed. When the Aggersund Bridge across the Limfjord was planned, the company says, Ostenfeld persuaded the Danish state to put the work out to private tender for the first time, and won it. Danish Wikipedia says design began in 1938 and calls it the first large Danish bridge designed by a private engineering firm, the state railways having previously held a monopoly. It opened in 1942.

That opening fell during the German occupation of Denmark, which lasted from 1940 to 1945. English Wikipedia says the invasion hit the business hard: resources were rationed and the Danish government put design work on hold, until state subsidies for civil engineering designs intended for the postwar years let the firm keep working and gain a lead on planning. Construction projects were launched quickly once the war ended.

Two partners’ initials and a foundation.

In 1946 the engineer Wriborg W. Jønson became an equal partner, and from then until 1973 the firm traded as Chr. Ostenfeld & W. Jønson, often shortened to O&J. The company says that shortly after the war it sent an engineer to France to learn prestressed concrete, a technique it then adapted to the Danish climate. Prestressed silos took the partnership abroad: English Wikipedia says its first international office opened in Paris for the French silo market, and Danish Wikipedia says that in 1956 it took over the Paris firm J. Cambon & Cie. In 1957 it designed the Fredrikstad Bridge in Norway, its first large bridge outside Denmark, the company says.

The present name comes from the two partners. When Ostenfeld retired in 1972, the company says, the business became foundation-owned and took the name COWI, from Christen Ostenfeld and Wriborg Jønson. English and Danish Wikipedia date the transfer to a foundation and the name COWIconsult to 1973, with the shorter COWI following in 1995.

Ownership has stayed with that foundation. The parent company, COWI Holding A/S, set up in 2010, is an unlisted Danish public company; the company says COWIfonden and its investment company held about 90 per cent of the share capital in May 2025, with present and former employees holding about 10 per cent. Its headquarters are in Kongens Lyngby, north of Copenhagen.

The work widened from the 1970s. English Wikipedia says the energy crises of that decade pushed the firm beyond bridges and structures into energy and the environment, including water treatment and waste management. The company lists among later projects all three parts of the Great Belt crossing, opened in 1998; the Øresund Bridge; the Copenhagen Metro, which it has worked on since 1994; and the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge in Turkey, opened to traffic in 2022 with a free span of 2,022 metres.

Design and documentation.

Engineering and infrastructure consultancies sell expertise rather than objects, so their identities have to stand in for work that is often invisible once it is finished: a tunnel, a water network or a power connection. Most of them present themselves with restraint. Their wordmarks tend to be short, set in a clean sans, and many are acronyms, founders’ surnames or invented names left over from mergers. Colour is usually limited to one strong tone, often a blue, an orange or a green, used against plenty of white space.

The pictures do much of the talking. Websites and reports in this field lean on project photography of bridges, rail lines and stations, water and wastewater works, energy plants and city districts, often taken wide and from the air so that the scale of the work is clear. People appear as teams on site or in the studio rather than as models, and diagrams, maps and drawings sit beside the photographs.

The structure of the websites is similar from firm to firm. Pages are commonly organised by sector, such as transport, water, energy, buildings and industry, and by service, such as design, engineering, project management and advisory work. Sustainability usually has a section of its own, and careers pages carry a large share of the message, since these businesses depend on recruiting architects, engineers and other specialists.

Much of the brand also lives in documents. Listed consultancies publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and many put out technical papers, research reports, indexes and case studies on individual projects. Typography in those documents is usually plain and functional, with charts and tables carrying the detail, so the identity has to work as well on a page of figures as on a hoarding around a building site.

Four letters from two partners’ names.

COWI has grown through acquisitions, often folding the businesses it buys into its own name. Danish Wikipedia says it bought Kampsax in 2002; English Wikipedia lists the British bridge engineers Flint & Neill in 2008, the tunnelling specialists Donaldson Associates in 2014 and the Danish architecture firm Arkitema in 2018. The Construction Index reported in January 2017 that Flint & Neill and Donaldson Associates had been rebranded with their Danish parent’s name as COWI UK, with 250 employees across six offices. New Civil Engineer reported in April 2022 that COWI had agreed to acquire the US bridge specialists Finley Engineering Group, and the company says it added the Icelandic engineering group Mannvit in 2023.

In January 2022, New Civil Engineer reported that COWI would no longer bid for fossil-fuel projects, following a similar decision by Arup, and that it aimed for all of its revenue to come from sustainability-related projects within three to five years. The company now describes itself as an engineering and consulting business of more than 7,500 people, mainly in Scandinavia, the UK, North America and India, organised into business lines for Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK and International, and North America.

For a design guide, COWI shows how two partners’ initials can become the name of a whole group. Compare Ramboll, another Danish engineering group, and Arup, whose fossil-fuel decision COWI followed. For this guide we use a deep teal, a cool grey and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep COWI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.