Kengo Kuma & Co. built a new building for the HC Hans Christian Andersen Museum, the center of the city and culture where Hans Christian Andersen was born. The site is located between a residential area with traditional medieval chalets and the newly developed urban area of Odense.
HC Andersen's work is a profound reflection of the author's life and his life journey. Andersen's work highlights the duality of opposites around us. Reality and imagination, nature and man-made, man and animal, light and darkness... Opposites coexist, not black and white. Architectural design is to reflect the essence of his work in the form of architecture and landscape.
The museum space consists of a series of circular shapes that cut into each other like chains. They are organized in a non-hierarchical, non-central manner. Linear green walls with continuous curves extend and trace the structure of underground space, defining gardens and paths above ground. It meanders above and below ground throughout the site.
In an interwoven sequence of spaces, visitors find themselves between the outside and the inside as the green walls appear and disappear. The journey of the museum will be narrative, an element of his work; the duality of opposites, dissolving boundaries, will be interpreted through spatial composition and ambiguity.
The exhibition space is planned underground. The charming above-ground garden is made up of curved linear hedges that echo the exhibition space underground. Here, the architectural form is reduced and visitors will be taken into a "labyrinth" of spaces created by trees and leaves.
The underground world is connected to the gardens above by a series of sunken gardens that act like a "hole" in the ground, a "gateway" from the fairytale world to the outside world. Landscape architecture blends natural elements with architectural elements to make the experience unique.
The completion of the building is the beginning of the life of the garden. In the years to come, the gardens will gradually mature, providing visitors and communities with a sense of nature and seasons, colours, smells, densities, transparency and changes in landscape. The HC Hans Christian Andersen Museum will play a central role in the new urban landscape of the city of Odense.
The development plan is to close one of the main roads and reconnect the two parts of the city. The museum garden offers a new public area that brings this "middle" area to life.
Part of the city where the writer's house is located, is still a medieval urban landscape, with small and winding streets that are the opposite of the wide and straight fast lanes of modern urban development. Winding paths and hedged gardens aim to restore the quality of the human scale and form a soft link with the urban area. Just as the realities and norms we take for granted in our daily activities are questioned by invisible and incomprehensible causes. Just as we are experiencing Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale world, escaping the invisible or learning to adapt and cope with the unknown.
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