kengo kuma’s hans christian andersen museum opens to the public in denmark

a ‘fantasy world’ museum opens in denmark

Following its soft inauguration last June, Denmark‘s Hans Christian Andersen Museum officially opens to the public, with architecture by Kengo Kuma & Associates. The museum takes shape as a cluster of curving volumes, organized to create a garden labyrinth. Visitors are invited to explore these in-between park spaces which had opened to the public earlier in the fall. The newly opened ‘H.C. Andersen Hus Museum’ thus introduces a ‘fantasy world’ to Odense in celebration of the 1805-born author. See designboom’s previous coverage of the fairytale museum here!

all images © Rasmus Hjortshøj | @coast_studio

Translating fairytales into architecture

Designing the Hans Christian Andersen Museum (see more here), the architects at Kengo Kuma & Associates (KKAA) translated the author’s fairytale stories into built space. In Andersen’s tale The Tinderbox, a tree reveals an underground world, which magically unearths new perspectives right in front of the beholder. The museum is arranged similarly — all the exhibition spaces are located underground.

Kengo Kuma, who worked on the project alongside Cornelius Vöge and MASU Planning, elaborates: ‘​The idea behind the architectural design resembled Andersen’s method, where a small world suddenly expands to a bigger universe.’ 

kengo kuma learns from hans christian andersen

A journey between the ‘real world’ and the ‘fantasy world,’ the visitor perpetually travels between the latticed volumes and the interstitial, meandering gardens bound by labyrinth-like hedges. The translucent walls which separates these two worlds suggests a soft and ambiguous division, much like that of Anderson’s stories.

Other stories which take shape as museum space include the Little Mermaid, and Thumbelina. An exhibition space is disguised as a pool of water, which visitors can occupy below and peer into from above. Meanwhile, a Giant’s Garden is filled with oversized plant-life as though visitors have been shrunken.