Like some titanic and fugitive submarine packed to its torpedo tubes with bootleg art, the new Danish National Maritime Museum is buried full fathom five − or some 10 metres − below ground. It is set between the township center of Helsingør in northwest Zealand and the fairy-tale Kronburg Castle. Guarding the Øresund strait as it passes between here and Helsingborg, a 20-minute ferry ride away on the swedish slide, the lavishly decorated Renaissance castle has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. Strict plan and inheritance laws protecting views of Kronburg, known across the Seven Seas as the home of Hamlet, William Shakespeare ’ s tragic Prince of Denmark, have forced the museum not equitable underground, but submerged, excessively .
aerial view of Kronburg Castle and the Oresund strait showing the museum in its waterfront context. Heritage regulations obliged the museum to be sunk belowground
Reading: Danish National Maritime Museum in Helsingør, Denmark by Bjarke Ingels Group – Architectural Review
All that surfaces is a clear glass bannister designed to stop passerby from falling into the former dry dock where the museum lurks nowadays out of sight however if not, as we will see, out of mind. What is very much out of spy and out of mind nowadays is the very cause this dry Helsingør dock and the submersible museum exist. This expose stretch of urban waterfront was, until a one-fourth of a hundred ago, Helsingør Værft, the shipyard where Jørn Utzon ’ mho father, an mastermind, worked and that dominated the town ’ randomness economy, its life and culture for a hundred from its possibility in 1882. At its point, in the 1950s, some 3,600 local people were employed here from a population of about 40,000 : Helsingør made ships .
By probability, I witnessed the establish of what must have been one of the very concluding of these on a trip to the Copenhagen Furniture Fair in 1983. This was Al-Zahraa, a 3,860-ton ship described to me by a group of engineers watching the event as a Ro-Ro ferry. In fact, Al-Zahraa was an Iraqi note ship built to carry military equipment for its authoritarian Saddam Hussein ’ randomness armed forces. soon after Al-Zahraa had sailed for Basra, her bound home port, Helsingør Værft closed up shop class. It was a huge blow to the town. Slowly and steadily, however, the township has reinvented itself as a cultural wedge .
The old shipyard is now home to the ambitious Culture Yard located in 19th-century nautical warehouses cloaked in faceted field glass by AART architects of Aarhus. The castle − whose first architect was the Italian-trained Hans Hendrik vanguard Paesschen, who went on to design the first Royal Exchange in London for Sir Thomas Gresham in the 1560s − was newly renovated, yet it lost the national nautical museum that had, for many years, graced its high-ceilinged rooms. Although, this was a limited and relax museum with models of historic ships in improbable timbre cases, just 50,000 people came this way each year, not enough to satisfy Helsingør ’ s new-found appetite for cultural tourism now that it had abandoned all-out ships .
Site plan of the former shipyard
And, so you gradually descend the giant ramp down into that dry bobtail in the long, phantasmagoric apparition of Kronburg. While the museum was under construction, a forlorn and rusting Al-Zahraa, which had been impounded in Bremerhaven since 1990 as united nations sanctions against Saddam ’ s Iraqi regimen hardened, was towed to Lithuania where she was cut up .
As if in compensate, Bjarke Ingels Group ( or BIG, formed in Copenhagen in 2005 ) and their Amsterdam-based exhibition architects, Kossmann.dejong − there are lots of bold yellow graphics here, always a sign that a dutch firm has been doing the rounds − have done their less-than-level best to imbue the museum with the sensations of a transport at sea. Ramps and sloping floors, combined with eccentrically angled display cases and sea-sickness-inducing video projections on walls that refuse to keep even, are some of the architectural and design games employed here to keep visitors rolling in the aisles .
BIG ’ second museum has been designed to attract a boastful audience in necessitate of rollicking entertainment. And, indeed, despite its being dug belowground and submerged, the modern maritime museum is a sensational thing. In fact, its subterranean placement only makes it all the more harbor. The big double-height sugarcoat ramps that zigzag through the exposed 1950s concrete dock lead down, in playful fashion, through impermanent exhibitions, auditoriums and a café to a squeeze of awkwardly shaped black-box galleries crammed − with hands-on displays, and those Captain Pugwash walls, and recorded sounds of the ocean – into the sides of the dock .
The ‘ all-shantying ’ overture can at times be overpowering
here are models and paintings, uniforms, sextants and figureheads and lots of digital games : you can tied tattoo a virtual sailor. Somewhere in all the darkness, noise and projections you can find out about liveliness on circuit board a 17th-century danish transport sailing to the colonies, about how between 1429 and 1857 up to two-thirds of the express ’ s income was derived from a toll paid by every ship making its room up Øresund to the Baltic Sea, and how food is containerised and transported absurd distances to supermarkets nowadays in an improvident attempt to satiate our desire for ever more and always cheaper calories .
The diaphanous make noise of the computer architecture and exhibition fit-out combined seem designed as if to make up for the historic personnel casualty of the enliven life of the decommission shipyard. The pier the museum sits in, and is a separate of, appears to have been preserved as an expose of itself − a kind of invalidate measuring an impressive 150 by 25 by 8 metres and typify, possibly, the personnel casualty of shipbuilding in Helsingør. tied then, the ‘ preserved ’ dock is something of a amour propre, as its walls have been rebuilt, and big windows cut into them to light museum offices and other spaces apparently secreted behind all that concrete .
Diagram showing the programmatic transformation of spaces
The potency of the museum ’ s design lies, I suppose, in the ways in which BIG have made the maximal, if not necessarily optimum, use of space given the very specific and demanding design restrictions placed on the site. And being BIG, the architects have upended these legal limitations to advantage, making what is surely a sensational distance. And, so far, wandering through these whizzy, dizzying spaces, I felt an increasing sense of nostalgia for the old maritime museum housed, as if on a happily becalmed sea, in the nearby castle.
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This feel took me in my mind ’ mho eye to two scandinavian nautical museums where the ships themselves and a truthful sense of the sea have constantly been more crucial than putting on entertainment for architectural neophiliacs while playing to the democratic drift to raise visitor numbers to the maximum. One is the calm, softly imaginative Viking Boat Museum at Roskilde, besides in Zealand, designed by Erik Christian Sørensen, which was opened in 1969 to display a belittled evanesce of longboats that had been intentionally sunk in Roskilde fjord in around 1070 to protect this colony against raids .
Floor plans – pawl to expand
here, Sørensen ’ sulfur layered, lightly day-lit and restrained concrete boathouse not only allows visitors to understand the nature and construction of the bony ships on display, but it besides serves as a base for fascinating work including the reconstruction of Viking boats on which visitors can sail. The sea here is happily real. meanwhile, little prepares first-time visitors to the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy, Oslo, for the dream-like sight of the Oseberg ship, an amazingly well-preserved Viking long boat crafted in oak and dating from about AD820 .
Its structure can entirely fascinate any architect worth his or her timbers, while the quality of its decoration would have sent William Morris into literary overdrive. And, yet, this boat − and its siblings here at Bygdøy − are berthed in a humble, purpose-built museum designed by Arnstein Arneberg in the guise of what appears to be a chapel service crossed with a boatshed. here, as at Roskilde, the architect has taken a step backwards to allow the Viking boats to reap their full aura. At Helsingør, the architecture dominates evening though it does its BIG thing below ground .
The newfangled architecture has a bravura timbre that matches the epic scale of the master structure – snap to expand
possibly, though, BIG and the danish Maritime Museum have done the right thing in shaping their by chance arresting build. I called up Trip Advisor, that gloriously comedian log written by some of the world ’ s most settle malcontents, to find this written recently by a visitor to Bygdøy : ’ While the Viking ships on display are alone objects, paying 90 norwegian krone for entry is just not worth it. vitamin a interesting as the idea of a Viking ship is, seeing three displayed in classify alcoves with a brief description of where they were found doesn ’ t make for very inspiring see .
The museum is unfortunately excessively little, with little else on display, and not matter to enough to warrant the price. ’ I thought the Oseberg embark was one of the most move and beautiful objects I have always seen, and it was more than enough to make a pilgrimage to Arneberg ’ s modest museum to experience this one dainty display. But, the danish Maritime Museum knows that the huge majority of visitors today want a very BIG bang for their danish krone. The more objects, the greater assortment of sparkling, blink, bleeping entertainment, and the more fun ramps to climb up and down the better .
part BB – cick to expand
curiously, though, one of the most celebrate of all Danish buildings not built in late decades, is Jørn Utzon ’ second 1963 design for the Silkeborg artwork gallery in Jutland. This was to have housed a collection of contemporary european art donated to the township by the painter Asger Jorn. The galleries were to have been buried through three underground storeys with entirely a small sculptural clerestory visible to passerby. A ramp would have wound its serpentine direction down into the galleries, their plan and human body shaped by equally complex geometries Utzon found in nature .
Silkeborg had been the headquarter of the Gestapo after the german invasion of Denmark in 1940 ; the Nazi secret police dug belowground bunkers into the beautiful forest landscape. Asger Jorn, a communist resistance champion sought, I can ’ t help oneself feel, to reverse the estimate of these bunkers, to shape with Utzon a earth of artwork and the resource in the depths of the cool, welcoming earth .
The museum was to have been quiet, discerning and soulful. When in 1964 he was offered a Guggenheim Award, with a generous cash prize attached, Asger Jorn wired back to Harry F Guggenheim : GO TO HELL BASTARD-STOP-REFUSE PRIZE-STOP-NEVER ASKED FOR IT-STOP-AGAINST ALL DECENCY MIX ARTIST AGAINST HIS WILL IN YOUR PUBLICITY-STOP-I WANT PUBLIC CONFIRMATION NOT TO HAVE PARTICIPATED IN YOUR RIDICULOUS GAME .
The entitle of BIG architects 400-page comic-style book publicising the practice ’ mho work is Yes is More. The strange thing about the fresh Danish Maritime Museum is that at first glance it appears to be about less − a national cultural building sink into a raw concrete void − even, once you take that beginning step down the ramp into the all-shantying world below deck, less become more and more, ever bigger and ever far removed from the composure beauty of maritime museums elsewhere in Scandinavia. Yet who could say that the Vikings themselves were a silence, well-behaved and unambitious lot as they set sail to run amuck in the world, big prison term ?
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The dock is preserved as an show in itself, although its walls have been rebuilt and unfold cut into it to illuminate new subterranean spaces
