How do you hide a building ? It vocalize like a rhetorical question , but it was the very real quandary confront the architects charged with progress a newMaritime Museum of Denmarka few years ago . The museum , you see , is locate a few hundred yards forth from Kronborg Castle — which wait on as the setting for Shakespeare ’s Hamlet and is protected by natural law .
To avoid interrupt the historic website with an 82,000 square infantry museum , Bjarke Ingels Groupdevised another design : Build it underground . Helsingor , the municipality where Kronborg and the museum are located , is locate between the Baltic and North Sea — so it ’s long been a center for shipping and more importantly , ship - building .
Nearby the rook , an abandon drydock — where ships were constructed for X — bid the perfect site for a building that postulate to remain incognito .
Construction began in 2008 , with the digging of hundreds of wads of dirt surrounding the decommission dry dock . Because the architect wanted to carry on the dock itself as a courtyard , they build up around it — reinforce the 60 - year - honest-to-goodness concrete wall with new backing and series of gallery and exposition space .
Image byseier+seier .
eventually , three walker bridge puncture the drydock itself — creating link between the ground level and the ulterior museum .
This is n’t the first rehabbed drydock in macrocosm — for object lesson , there ’s aplaygroundbuilt on a former wharfage along NYC ’s East River — but it may be the first to use a drydock as part of a young building while preserving it .
It does n’t hurt that it also brings flock of Inner Light and air down into the otherwise windowless exposition spaces . The ruined museum , which open to the public earlier this calendar month , is an incredibly interesting manipulation of negative space — an “ urban abyss , ” as Ingels discover it .
As unlikely as it seems , it ’s a dexterous answer to a whole host of design problem : From preserving the palace , to show off a historic dry wharf , to lighting an underground space and creating a public green .
To quote Lord Polonius ( sorry ): Though this be lunacy , yet there is method in ‘ t.
ArchitecturedenmarkDesign
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