In the summer of 2021, the new Hans Christian Andersen Museum will open in Odense. The brand-new museum aims to rethink how the story of Andersen’s life and work is told. The museum will provide an artistic experience, which combines landscape, architecture and modern exhibition design, and it will offer new perspectives on one of the most beloved and creative thinkers in world history. The new museum was designed by the Japanese star architect Kengo Kuma and his team, the garden was designed by Masu Planning.
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Hans Christian Andersen is not merely one of the most famous and read authors in world history, admired everywhere for his fantastical fairytales. Starting in the summer of 2021, his amazing stories will also serve as the foundation of a brand-new type of museum, which will not simply communicate about Andersen, but as Andersen:
“We have to dive into the fairytales as the very first thing, because they are what everyone knows.The idea is not to retell the stories, but rather to communicate their familiarity and inspire further reading of Andersen,” says Torben Grøngaard Jeppesen, the head of Odense City Museums.
The vision for the museum is to spatialize the experience of Andersen’s literary universe and stage a complete artistic experience in which architecture, sound, light and a stream of images constantly create new encounters between each visitor and Andersen’s fairytales.
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New perspectives on ourselves, on nature and society
”Hans Christian Andersen’s artistic universe is fantastic, because it reverses how you imagine this world you thought you knew, but without putting anything else in its place. His fairytales do not point towards a universal truth, but rather into the open – towards the peculiarity and multiplicity of the world. In the new museum, we maintain this ambiguity by using Andersen’s own artistic strategies as the starting point for how the garden, the house and the exhibition have all been shaped, as well as for the many artistic contributions that will also be part of the museum,” explains Creative Director of the new museum, Henrik Lübker.
As such, the new museum will provide a space for the pursuit of puzzlement, the imagination and magic adventures, all of which will provide food for thought and create new perspectives on ourselves, on nature and society –both for the Danish and the international visitors of all ages thatrush to Odense every year to experience the birthplace of the poet, which will also be part of the new museum.
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Kengo Kuma and poetic museum architecture
The new museum is designed by Japanese star architect Kengo Kuma and his team, who are also behind the new Olympic stadium in Tokyo. As part of the design process, the esteemed architect has found inspiration in Andersen’s fairytale ‘The Tinderbox’, in which a tree reveals an underground world, which magically reveals new perspectives right in front of the beholder.
”The idea behind the architectural design resembled Andersen’s method, where a small world suddenly expands to a bigger universe,” explains Kengo Kuma.
The museum site covers an area of 5,600 square meters and contains a children’s house and an underground museum, which intertwines with a surrounding magical garden. On top of that, the museum will consist of a wide array of state-of-the-art technologies and approaches to set design, which will all add to the experience of Andersen’s magical universe coming to life.
Substantial donation from The A.P. Møller Foundation
The new museum is one of Denmark’s largest and most ambitious museum projects in recent years, and it has been made possible through a substantial donation from The A.P. Møller Foundation as well as contributions from Nordea-fonden, The Augustinus Foundation, Knud Højgaards Fond and the City of Odense.
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Text Credit: H.C. Andersen’s House
Young architect’s firm Lipinsky Lasovks Johanson has won the architectural competition for the Forest Finn Museum in Finland. Their design merges architecture with its surroundings: An exciting example of how architecture and nature can go hand in hand.
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The museum deals with the topic of the so-called ‘Skogfinner’: farmers who moved from eastern Finland to the woodlands of Sweden and Norway during the 16th and 17th century. Using fire clearance, they turned forest areas into arable land. This sparked a conflict with the growing industry which again was in great need of charcoal. For this reason, the government had an ambivalent attitude towards the immigrants. Up until the 20th century, the Forest Finns had their own culture and language but merged more and more into the Norwegian and Swedish society. The Forest Finn Museum will tell the story of this minority.
Forest In A House
The museum will be located between a grove and a river and the architecture picks up the forest as a common theme. The simple green saddle roof and wooden stelae make the building look like a primitive hut. Stable wooden beams support the roof, allowing the glass facade to wind around the interior like a ribbon without any structural purpose. This way, the forest seems to expand into the building. The stelae are placed across the inside space in a seemingly random order, the layout of the building doesn’t guide visitors through the exhibition but invites them to go astray and wander about.
Visual Axes
Within the glass ribbon, the architects have placed exhibition spaces in square rooms. The arrangement of these cuboids keeps the visual axes between the forest and the river clear. This makes for an almost transparent building that fits seamlessly into the forest landscape and doesn’t block the view. Architecture and landscape seem to melt into one another.
The young architects have come up with a design that not only interacts with its surroundings but also reflects the topic of the museum outwards which makes the museum a place that sparks interest and invites its visitors to playfully discover its topic.
In Moscow the territory around the Polytechnic Museum will be transformed into “Museum Park” – a well thought out public space, whose structure answers the needs of the Museum and its visitors, as well as intensive transport and pedestrian flows.
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How to turn the forecourt of a museum into a vibrant and busy place of urban life? Think of a place that competes on equal terms with parks, cinemas and restaurants. The new Museum Park (‘Muzeiny Park’) – based on a concept of the award winning Japanese architect Junya Ishigami – is a pedestrian zone and public space that will help to draw city dwellers into the Polytechnic Museum. The concept connects Metro exits, Museum building entrances, routes followed by both Polytechnic Museum visitors and regular pedestrians, transport flows and the logistical requirements of the Museum.
The new Museum Park
The idea itself is simple and groundbreaking at the same time: Ishigami’s proposal is based on activating the semi-subterranean basement level of the Museum by inclining the ground level around the building and planting the slopes and courtyard spaces with trees. As a result, a park would be formed both within and around the Museum, increasing the total area to 12 000 m².
An amphitheatre for urban life
In 2017 on this basis the architectural bureau Wowhause and therewith the development team directors Dmitry Likin and Oleg Shapiro will create a park-amphitheatre, an open-air foyer that will become an extension of the spaces inside the building, to which it will form a prologue. The concept aims to unite the new pedestrian zone in the building’s basement level with the outdoor area alongside Lubyanka Square, attracting pedestrians and providing them with a convenient and pleasant route into the Museum complex. During winter time the entire subterranean level will be covered with a roof and provided with heating to ensure that Museum Park will be used all year long frequently as a place that invites both museum visitors and strollers to stay.
Architect Jean Verville wins coveted Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ invited competition for the development of Museum Avenue. During summer 2016, his elegant installation Dance Floor offers a lively landscape animated by an exuberant trompe-l’oeil. With Verville’s proposal the participants experiment movement, both free and structured by the course, to surrender to the pleasure of an impulsive action or casual wandering. Welcoming varied and unforgettable performances, Dance Floor shines a new dynamism to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ area.
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With paving made of more than 5,000 footprints, Dance Floor installation composed a stunning mosaic reminiscent of hammered gold, nod to the theme of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ exhibition Pompeii. The gesture, of an equally unexpected as sensational simplicity, traces some chaos proper to crowd and invite passersby to improvise steps on this huge dancing floor. Shaping a new urban intersection, architect Jean Verville transforms the pedestrian street into a giant interactive activity enlivening downtown Montreal with formidable improvised dances, while encouraging the visitor to build its customized tour within the works of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Sculpture Garden.
The architect
The practice of Jean Verville is on the fringe of mainstream architecture. For each proposal, architecture, design, museum installation or object, the architect uses the architectural promenade as material to develop the spatial qualities of his experiments. In addition to its award-winning practice and his significant international publications Jean Verville continues his investigations on architectural design process through a PhD at Université du Québec à Montréal.
Client: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Typology: Urban installation
Location: Montreal, Canada
Superficy: 3.000 square feet
Year of conception: 2015
Year of construction: 2016
The Netherlands Army Museum and the Netherlands Air Force Museum have merged into a new museum at the former Soesterberg Airbase. On 11 December the new National Military Museum was officially opened by the Dutch King HRH Willem Alexander after a selection, design and construction period of four years. The team of Heijmans (contractor), Claus van Wageningen Architects, H+N+S Landscape Architects, and Kossmann.deJong Exhibition Architects won the original DBFMO tender.
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The 45-hectare site was the birthplace of aviation in the Netherlands. It bears traces of WWII history and NATO use, and also has important natural qualities. The establishment of the new museum at the site is sized to let the landscape play an important role. The design team made a plan that excites, and invites the visitor to experience stories of the Dutch armed forces. The landscape forms the very real backdrop for the exhibition inside the museum, with its fully glazed facade. The museum and its surroundings tell multiple stories: the history of the place, the geographic context of lines of defense and training areas in the surroundings, and the intense relationship of the military and its tactics with the landscape. The area has become an exciting landscape where open and secluded and sturdy and sensitive qualities form a unity.
The 45-hectare museum district is part of the former Soesterberg Airbase, which is being developed as a nature reserve. In the plan the new museum is surrounded by heath and forest, allowing the landscape to be seen from within the museum in every direction in relation to the collection. The whole museum district will be made publicly accessible during daytime. It is divided into three terraces, each with a dominant theme. The top of the hill is a peaceful nature area with a heath valley. On the middle terrace – where the visitor arrives – the history of the area is displayed. Located near the runways, on the lowest level, is the museum complex with a 3,000-person arena on one side, and a memorial area with a garden and plaza on the other side of the museum.
Bringing together cultural heritage, recreation and natural development was a challenging task, for which a zoning plan was woven into the design. In order to develop a visually interesting and ecologically valuable forest, an innovative planting plan was put together in collaboration with forest ecologists, inspired by natural forest dynamics. The use of gabions to create terrace edges, opening up WWII bomb craters and the restoration of representative buildings make the past visible again. Vistas provide a clear orientation and a varied experience of this new natural and narrative landscape.
