Ordrupgaard Museum houses French Impressionist art and Danish art from the Golden Age with an exquisite collection of paintings by artists such as Monet, Gauguin and Hammershøi.
hidden
Like an iceberg, you never see the full extent of the museum.
A design based on curiosity and discovery.
Many of the museum’s works are currently in storage due to lack of space. The extension creates an underground expansion of Ordrupgaard, which can accommodate previous stored works, so the museum’s international collection can be fully exhibited.
How do you make an underground museum extension to an already iconic museum complex?
The new extension is placed among several iconic buildings. Instead of creating a competitive monolith, we wanted to create an extension that ties the existing buildings together and creates new connections within the museum and the surrounding park.
Dan Stubbergaard, architect and founder, Cobe
The extension is placed underground as a well defined volume.
Inside, smaller galleries provide intimate spaces for the art collections.
A roof is placed on top with the galleries sticking through to let in natural daylight.
The roof is designed as a garden with flowers and skylights that grants view between inside and outside.
Perceived as a village in a valley the houses provide intimate art galleries and the space between makes up the city streets with plazas and circulation. The skylights let in natural daylight and the roof creates a new mosaic garden.
The size of the galleries is based on the Paul Gauguin room from Odrupgaard’s original gallery. The skylights of the galleries are adjusted to create spatial and light variation. The corners of the galleries are rounded to create a soft comfortable interior.
Collection rooms of 6m × 8 m.
Tapered to adjust to the amount of light required in collection rooms and in the circulation area.
Rounded to facilitate circulation and softer daylight.
The galleries are placed freely in the valley thereby creating natural inner streets through the underground expansion. Here sculptures are exhibited and visitors can rest and enjoy the view to the outside.
Benches are placed next to the gallery entrances making it possible to sit and observe life on the street.
Each gallery has its own dedicated collection of paintings. To create the perfect lighting for the paintings, the houses point towards the sky in different directions. They thus become iconic figures with individual sizes and designs. In this way, each gallery gets its own composition of light.
The unique composition of light in each gallery is designed specifically to cater to the individual requirements of each period piece. Lighting within each gallery is kept constant through filters and extra lighting, while the daylight in between the galleries varies depending on time of day and year.
Daylight principles
becomes park
The Ordrupgaard Museum is surrounded by a series of different and varied gardens.
The new extension has its own condensed garden which functions as a new garden within the existing park.
Inspired by an Impressionist painting the beams of the roof form a crackled pattern similar to Pointillist painting techniques from the Impressionism.
Where painting becomes park
Walking on the roof looking into the valley becomes part of the experience. The galleries break through the roof surface as part of the roof composition, while their openings draw light into the spaces below.
The mosaic pattern is created through a composition of open and closed panels. These panels mix reeds and flowers, transparent and translucent glass as well as water. In some places the mosaic pixels rise and become seating elements. All contributes to a playful landscape both above and underground.
Walking under the garden creates a poetic experience like walking thought the forest.
An archipelago of underground exhibition cocoons emerges beneath the Impressionistic landscape.
The entrance to the new extension is through a spectacular staircase staging the experience that lies ahead and the drama of the underground gallery space.
