Green Space White Open

Location: Copenhagen
Client: SMK National Gallery of Denmark and Municipality of Copenhagen
Team: Stig L. Andersson, Helene Koch, Jule Sophie Wittorf, Kristoffer Holm Pedersen, Christian Kuczynski, Katrine Sandstrøm, Tine Langsted Krogstrup
Design phase: 2011
Type: 2nd prize, invited competition
Area: 7.500 m2
Collaborators: Keinicke & Overgaard, Rambøll

What should a central place as the Museum Garden at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen include? A green park with fragrant flowers and space for recreation? An open, urban space with the city's pulse and life? Or maybe a real monumental square in front of one of the country´s main and most significant cultural institutions? These questions SLA set out to answer with its competition proposal for SMK Museum Gardens.

SLA's proposal unites all the possible requirements the SMK Museum Garden demands for design and use. With the competition project SLA proposes to create a green, open garden space for the entire Copenhagen, which embraces both the urban and the natural, the contextualized and the unique, the recreational and the convivial. All with art and culture as a cardinal point. SLA calls this proposal ’Green Space White Open’.

Green Space White Open handles SMK Museum Gardens from several different approaches, however, all brought together in a unified expression, a single garden space. By creating a green space around the building, wild and processed nature provide an evocative and tranquil setting for museum visits. With its green, slightly undulating terrain SMK Museum Gardens will naturally be added to Copenhagen's long green park strip, stretching from the Citadel, along the ancient ramparts and the Castle Garden and all the way to Tivoli.

This green space is perforated by a bright, urban space that draws the city and urban life into the Museum Garden and right up to the museum's main entrance. This creates the opportunity for interaction between the museum and city, between art and life. Here the urban space`s bright surface generates room for temporary art exhibitions, theater, outdoor serving, play and spontaneous events that normally belong to the city's pulse.

By drawing the city all the way to the museum creates not just life around the museum, but also a fusion between the museum's white space and the urban space`s bright surface that can be staged and include arts, culture and temporary exhibitions. By creating this increased correlation between the museum and the city, the National Gallery of Denmark will break with the art museum´s conventional 'white cube' and reach out of itself and specifically invite the surrounding city within. Not as a closed white cube, but as a white open, wide open, modern cultural institution.

Today the pavement around the city's parks functions as a transportation zone for pedestrians and as fencing around the parks: A mono-functional border zone occupying many square meters without adding greater value to the city. At the National Gallery of Denmark SLA suggests this zone to be activated and pulled into the Museum Garden - all the way to the art. This occurs in two ways: Partly, by softening the boundary between the surrounding sidewalks and the Museum Garden; partly by drawing the city's space all the way to the museum´s entrance.

In the Museum Garden's meeting with the surrounding sidewalks the garden space`s outer edge is 'pushed' and 'twisted', so the current straight separation between garden and city is blurred. Instead this creates inroads, shifts and withdrawals of the coating to facilitate informal stay and recreation, as well as smaller, alternative entrances to the garden and museum.

In the outer edge of the Museum Garden outside exhibition space is established, so called cultural spots that provide a framework for changing exterior exhibitions and performances. Both the sidewalk area and the cultural spots are created in light coating to ensure a continuous expression and in order to give the museum the opportunity to reach beyond its borders and reach all the way in - and interact with - the city.

The urban space Green Space White Open provides the National Gallery of Denmark with the possibility to reach beyond itself and invite the whole city inside, while at the same time allowing the museum to reach out into the city and interact directly with city life.

‘The treatment of the edge is the competition's most convincing offer on the relationship between inside and outside, city and park in that particular place. The edge creates with its elegant game of flow and features, niches and fertility a strong attraction to the garden and a convincing relationship between openings and condensations; a relationship that simultaneously creates transparency between the city and the museum and the feeling of stepping into another world.’

- Excerpt from judge report.