Photo: Colin Seymour
Beneath the dunes of time Popular with bathers, the grassy sand dunes of western Jutland provide access to long, lazy hours of summer fun and the sparkling sea. The tourists and locals scrambling across them may fail to notice that they hide many centuries of history and secrets, too. If you look closely, four sharp lines cut through one of the largest dunes, revealing a world beneath the sand. Aided by the Bjarke Ingels Group’s breathtaking building, the extraordinary museum Tirpitz tells the story of the last 40 million years of West Coast history, from the shaping of the amber you might pick up outside to the minefield left over from the Second World War.
can access via the museum. The bunker, which was built to protect access to the industrial stronghold of Esbjerg, is heavy, dark and menacing. The museum, on the other hand, is light, bright and inviting, despite its total immersion in the sand, thanks to the ingenuity of the team behind it.
By Louise Older Steffensen | Photos: Mike Bink
“We’ve got a floating concrete roof that, despite weighing 1,000 tonnes, seems weightless atop the huge windows – which happen to be the largest pieces of glass installed anywhere in Denmark,” Jensen explains. “It means that we actually get a great amount of natural light, despite being underground. A lot of newer museums choose to go the opposite way, making the exhibition space into a dark and simple ‘black box’, which makes it easy to make use of technolo-
“We set BIG, the Bjarke Ingels Group, an impossible challenge: design a worldclass piece of architecture that doesn’t interfere with the landscape around it – create a stand-out building, and make it invisible,” says Claus Kjeld Jensen, museum director at Vardemuseerne. “They managed to do exactly that. The building we’ve got today is beyond anything I’d imagined.” 56 | Issue 129 | October 2019
When the Tirpitz Museum opened in June 2017, the eyes of the world were already sneaking a peek in anticipation, from the USA’s CNN to the British Guardian. Built as a museum to the ominous fortress-like Tirpitz Bunker nextdoor, the museum playfully takes up the bunker’s concrete expression, but the resultant building is the complete opposite of its neighbour, which guests