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Den Gamle By is an open air museum, where visitors are met by buildings from five different centuries: quite unexpectedly, the museum is situated in The Botanical Gardens, next to busy traffic junctions, tall modern office buildings and a dense housing area. Here, the old and the new embrace each other and contribute to each other’s lives. And with a new iconic main entrance which opened in April 2023, the embrace is emphasised even further as the new building draws on strong references to both history as well as the diverse urban life that goes on right in front of the museum.
Den Gamle By is a journey in time. When you enter, you find yourself surrounded by buildings from five centuries. Volunteers dressed as our ancestors act as guides through history and communicate traditional crafts to several hundred thousand visitors each year.
Even though Den Gamle By is a museum undergoing constant transformation, it required a closer physical connection to the neighbouring modern city. The task for the new entrance building was exactly that.
An open air town-museum showing a journey through time. Images show different areas of Den Gamle By.
“We wanted to mark our presence in the city, and we wanted a physical connection between now and then,” says Thomas Bloch Ravn from Den Gamle By. Having headed the museum for more than 25 years, Bloch Ravn has been responsible for many building projects in the open-air Museum that tell the story of urban history and culture in Denmark. A new main entrance has been on his wish list for a long time, with the ambition to create an entrance that acts as an open invitation to a diverse audience. But he also dreamt of an entrance that breaks down the invisible barrier that many people feel towards museums as institutions that demand knowledge and maybe even an academic background. The museum is very keen to activate its audience, and the new entrance emphasises this invitation. The museum is also succeeding in attracting visitor groups that are not among the traditional museum crowd. The audience is a combination of citizens of Aarhus as well as people visiting from other parts of the world.
“We believe that we have a responsibility in society. A museum is nothing in itself. We play a role as a place for our collective memory, and we can pose important questions. We do not aim to create a museum for the past; we want to create a museum that plays an active part in the discussion of how we shape our present and our future”, says Bloch Ravn.
The entrance area is visually crowded with The Botanical Gardens, a busy traffic hub and of course Den Gamle By as the backdrop. And as if those visual elements were not enough, there is also the iconic pavilion designed by renowned Danish architect Anton Rosen for the national exhibition in Aarhus in 1909 – a round wooden pavilion with clear visual cues from an earlier century. All these very different expressions needed a firm visual connection to bring them together and become one united experience that lead people towards Den Gamle By.
A selection of architects were invited to answer the brief for Den Gamle By. Transparency and the use of materials that visitors will find in Den Gamle By, such as wood and bricks, were what the competition programme asked for.
The task of shaping the new entrance was put in the hands of the Aarhus-based architect CUBO. And from the very first sketches, the architects fell in love with the shape of an umbrella as the main influence. Architect Bo Lautrup from CUBO explains how the umbrella is a universal shelter for people. Under the umbrella people can gather in a common space where gaps between people are erased.
“We wanted to make a connection not only to Den Gamle By but also to The Botanical Gardens. The use of wood is a direct reference not only to the old pavilion and to a lot of the buildings you will see when you visit the museum, but also a clear reference to all the trees in The Botanical Gardens”, says Bo Lautrup.
The idea of creating a dialogue between the materials visitors will experience in the museum and the new entrance is also seen in CUBO’s use of bricks as the floor inside the new entrance building and also by allowing the brick floor to spread outside the building to become the connecting material between the lawns in The Botanical Gardens and the museum entrance. The new entrance also uses large quantities of glass to emphasise the idea of transparency.
“For us it was important to aim at a high level of transparency in order to allow people passing the museum, also at night when the museum is closed, to get a glimpse into Den Gamle By. By using glass facades, we create a visual invitation that might evoke curiosity in people who have not yet visited the museum,” Bo Lautrup explains.
“We aimed to create a soft journey from new to old and to connect the modern city and Den Gamble By in a way that respects the surroundings,” Bo Lautrup says.
Inside the new entrance building, the architects have chosen VOLA products.
“For us VOLA was the obvious choice. VOLA draws on a Danish design tradition with simplicity, honesty and a clear logic. VOLA connects to the Danish building tradition and in that sense the products help us tell the story of both what was and what will come,” Bo Lautrup concludes.
