Description

The external appearance of North Jutland’s sculpturally-designed art museum, marked by a stepped roof and clad with white marble, glass, and copper sheets is to be understood as a reaction as well to the topographic situation, a valley surrounded on three sides by tree-covered slopes, the bottom of which is somewhat lower than the access road. It is above all, however, as it almost always is with Aalto, the consequence of his spatial arrangement of the interior.

The main floor on the street level is arranged around a high central hall that can be used both as an auditorium and an exhibition room. It is surrounded on two sides by the angled entrance foyer accessed via the northern corner of the building. With its glass walls the height of the room, the foyer opens to the exterior and leads on one hand via a stairway to the reading rooms situated underneath, the restaurant, the underground garage partly slid into the mountain, and into the sculpture garden closed off by a theatre of an unusual shape, and on the other hand, leads in both directions into the exhibition area. The exhibition rooms are connected to the circulation around the central hall in such a way that they themselves never function as thoroughfares so that visitors are able to contemplate the artworks undisturbed. On the side facing the sculpture garden are situated seven small rooms lit from the side. Right-angled to this, oriented toward the southeast, an enormous exhibition room takes in approximately half of the entire floor area; although structured by columns arranged in a grid and the very dominant lighting architecture, it is basically open and can be subdivided at will by moveable walls.

While the high-ceilinged hall is lighted through the glass walls of the vaulted-over roof terraces, the large exhibition room receives its light through slanting, asymmetric roof crowns. From here, the light falls at an angle of 90 degrees on the north side and 56 degrees on the south side onto enormous parabolic reflectors hanging in the depths of the room; the reflectors cast shadowless light onto the whitewashed walls – a construction that Aalto first used in 1955 in the Finnish Pavilion of the Biennale in Venice.

Arkitektur 16/1972, pp. 182-199 • Karl Fleig, Alvar Aalto, Vol. I 1922-1962, 3rd ed. Zurich, 1970 • Karl Fleig, Alvar Aalto, 2nd ed. Zurich, 1979, pp. 81-83 • Architecture and Urbanism, extra edition 5/1983, pp. 144-147 • Else Bülow, Art and Alvar Aalto, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum, 1991 • Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto. A Life’s Work – Architecture, Design and Art, Keurun, 1994, pp. 120-122 • Aase Bak/Christoffer Harlang, Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum. Elissa & Alvar Aalto, Jean-Jacques Baruël, Copenhagen, 1999

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