Description

Created for a collection of contemporary art in the course of development, the new museum was at the same time to be a cultural landmark in northern Copenhagen, and in addition to form a counterpart to the Louisiana Museum not far away. Søren Robert Lund, who was still a student when he won the competition, describes the interaction between the building and the surrounding coastal landscape with its beaches, ports, and lakes as the focus of his planning. Although he uses the ship metaphor so often encountered in modern architecture, he does not use the image of a stranded ship “as a form element, but as a creative starting point for the design.” Taking up and accentuating the linearity of the landscape with a collage of wall slices of various forms and sizes and extended metal sails, he tries to unite figurative and abstract tendencies.

The original plan called for the interior to be open to the exterior; now, however, it is shielded as much as possible from the exterior. Access is supplied via the main entrance to the west, from which one turns right to go into a main foyer spanned by a steel footbridge and illuminated by a domed skylight. From there, one goes into a theatre, a cinema, a restaurant or turns left into the central “art axis.” This exhibition room, 150 metres long, runs tautly through the museum like a drawn bowstring. Illuminated evenly from above by a band of light along its straight wall, the dynamics of its dimensions unfolds, swelling up and dying down as it progresses. It broadens out to a maximum width of 10 metres, and from a height of 12 metres at the entrance, diminishes to 3.5 metres at the other end – an impressive effect. This room also accesses the rectangular exhibition rooms laid out around a sculpture garden in the eastern part of the building. These rooms receive bright daylight through translucent skylights and planes of glass articulated by latticed forms. A sea view can only be had from the restaurant, whose form reminds one of the skeleton of a ship set on stilts and thus concretizes the ship metaphor once again.

Baumeister 10/1996, pp. 21-27 (Eric Messerschmidt) • Bauwelt 40/1996, pp. 2273 • Deutsche Bauzeitschrift 3/1997, pp. 57-62 • Living Architecture 15/1997, pp. 116-133 (Henrik Sten Moller) • Contemporary Museums (Architectural Design Profile 130), 1997, pp. 78-81 • Francisco Asensio Cerver, The Architecture of Museums, New York, 1997, pp. 84-95

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Originally published in: Paul von Naredi-Rainer, Museum Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2004.