Helsingor, Denmark

Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) Architects

2013

Danish architect Bjarke Ingels founded BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), a now Copenhagen, New York, London and Barcelona based group of architecture and designers. The firm has received numerous awards and is known globally for its buildings and design approaches. “In Masterplanet, BIG applies that thinking to the entire earth, laying out how we can redesign the planet to cut greenhouse emissions, protect resources and adapt to climate change.” (23)

The Helsingor Maritime Museum and Helsingor Municipality were the clients of the project and created a competition in which the brief was to place the museum in the dry dock. The competition was funded by 4 major shipping companies in 2004 to place a museum in the dry dock and eleven foundations funded the project to completion in 2013.(25)

The danish maritime museum is located in Helsingor, north-eastern Denmark along the narrowest point of the sound. The town is the closest point to neighbouring Sweden, and the town of Helsingborg. It is therefore only a short ferry journey across  and often visited by swedes for cheap supplies or a day out. The town is known for its medieval character and Kornberg castle, famous from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.(24)

Helsingor, Denmark is further north than the other buildings in the project, and therefore has more extreme amounts of daylight from the summer to winter solstice. The diagrams above show both the average monthly hours of sunshine, and the percentage of sunshine throughout a day. The graphs are taken from the nearest weather station in Copenhagen, with the town of Helsingor being 24 miles away further north. The town is also not in a high rise urban setting, with little light pollution.(26) (Graphs (26))

The dry dock was actually filled with water and created challenges which required building a new, more structurally sound dock. The building was not allowed to protrude above ground level to protect the view of the famous Kronburg castle. (27)

The building is very carefully placed into it surroundings, leaving the 60 year old dock untouched. The galleries have all been placed below ground in a continuous loop, the central courtyard being the shape of the ship, with three double level bridges spanning across the dock, which both provide an urban connection between sites and short cuts inside the museum to different areas and galleries. The harbour bridge is described as acting as a promenade and the auditorium pictured below is situated along one of the bridges, sloped and also connecting the culture yard with hamlets famous castle and UNESCO heritage site. The zig zag bridge gently slopes to bring the visitors into the museum entrance, a floor below ground level.

As all the floors slope slightly – connecting the exhibition spaces with the auditorium, classrooms, offices, café and dock floor.(28) By creating these sloped floors, the museum wraps around the dock creating open sculptural spaces over 2 floors, which most importantly draws the visitors to the dock as they travel through the museum. The courtyard of the dock also gives the visitor a proper, and accurate scale of the ship.(25) The museum layout was to be twice the size of the size of the dock, which meant spreading the museum over two floors, which created this idea of “concealed claustrophobic basement with no view.” However danish law requires all work spaces to have daylight and views, which would have meant workers having to work in a separate building. The radical proposal from BIG to place the museum around the footprint of the dock, rather than inside it, solved these problems and thus saw the firm wining the competition. Described as wrapping the dock like a doughnut, the museum is places between the walls of the original dry dock and the new dock that stopped water coming through.(25)

Having visited this building a few years ago on a trip to Copenhagen, and it was found really interesting that the whole building was almost invisible from afar and it was only when up close the building – sunken into the ground, it could be seen. One of the main things noticed was how although the building was completely underground, how bright it was and how the bridges and glass were used to create bright daylight lit exhibition spaces. Ingels describes that by using the shape of the dock, it both preserves the heritage structure of the 60 year old dock and creating a courtyard that brings daylight and air into the museum and also makes the museum almost invisible, which was a crucial feature when taking Kornberg castle, one of demarks most well known attractions, into account. (29)

The architects deal with the challenge of the building really well, the building doesn’t disrupt the surroundings but still provides bright, accessible spaces. When thinking about buildings underground, and basements, usually ideas of dark dreary spaces pop into mind, however I think this project captures that being underground doesn’t mean dark. By using double storey bridges, spaces that are glazed on both sides are formed and the function of these spaces and the amount of light is maximized, with he stepped auditorium in one of the bridges. It’s evident that the function of the building has a large role to play when considering light and windows. As the function of this building is a public building designed for visitors, having to think of people working in certain spaces for multiple hours a day is less important. The large bridges glazed on either side would most likely cause problems in term of glare and excess light if there were people sitting at desks or staying in that space all day. As it’s a museum people are merely passing through so glare and surplus of light is not an issue if people only experience the space for a short period of time.

“The museum demonstrates that by proactively cross-breeding public infrastructure—a dry dock—with social programs, we can inject new urban life forms into the heart of our cities . . . any city that has lost its former industries and is looking for ways to look forward without forgetting its past.” (25)

Photographs - Rasmus Hjortshøj

23.     Architect Bjarke Ingels’ Plan for Addressing Climate Change | TIME [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 24]. Available from: https://time.com/collection/great-reset/5900743/bjarke-ingels-climate-change-architecture/

24.     Helsingør travel | Denmark, Europe - Lonely Planet [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 24]. Available from: https://www.lonelyplanet.com/denmark/zealand/helsingor-elsinore

25.     The Danish Maritime Museum | BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group, Kossmann.dejong, Junckers | Archello [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 26]. Available from: https://archello.com/project/the-danish-maritime-museum

26.     Climate and average monthly weather in Helsingør (Hovedstaden), Denmark [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 27]. Available from: https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Rainfall-Temperature-Sunshine-fahrenheit,helsingor-dk,Denmark

27.     Danish Maritime Museum | Architect Magazine [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 22]. Available from: https://www.architectmagazine.com/awards/annual-design-review/danish-maritime-museum_o

28.     Danish National Maritime Museum / BIG | ArchDaily [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 22]. Available from: https://www.archdaily.com/440541/danish-national-maritime-museum-big?ad_source=search&ad_medium=search_result_all

29.     BIG completes the danish national maritime museum [Internet]. [cited 2020 Oct 24]. Available from: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/big-completes-the-danish-national-maritime-museum-10-18-2013/