A NATURAL CHALLENGE In the green hills of Skåde, the new Moesgaard Museum breaches the rolling green landscape. Jan Skamby Madsen, Director of the museum, explains the incentive and the vision for the prizewinning building. “If you need to completely rethink the way you present things, you also need new surroundings.” It is that simple, if you ask Jan Skamby Madsen, who has watched the development of the new Moesgaard Museum from his accession to the directorship in 1996 to the official opening in October 2014. Before the new museum became a reality, the culturehistorical collection was exhibited in the nearby historic manor house, Moesgård. But the inflexible surroundings of the historically listed manor house were limiting the possibilities of the museum: “Previously, you needed to be an amateur archaeologist to find our collection interesting, because it was simply exhibits displayed in endless rows. We wanted to reinvent ourselves,” explains the Director. The days of being boxed-in had to come to an end and a new building, tailor-made for international exhibitions, was scheduled.
the artefacts on display—to give visitors a sense of the excitement of discovery. Instead of just passing by row upon row of display cases that keep the objects at a distance, visitors should feel they are a part of the excavation. It was therefore with great expectations that Jan Skamby Madsen looked forward to the new museum, but the Director also had great concerns about placing an enormous building in the beautiful landscape south of Aarhus. “It was essential to us that we got a spacious building with the opportunity to explore new ways of communicating the past, but, at the same time, we wanted the building to be fitted well into the landscape. What troubled us the most was, how we could build big in these beautiful hills without destroying the natural surroundings. We were very uneasy about this, because we love this place so much.” Henning Larsen Architects’ proposal convinced the management of the museum that the challenge could be resolved, and so began the construction of the new Moesgaard Museum.
The idea with the new building was to position museum visitors at eye level with the archaeologists who dug out
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