Kengo Kuma & Associates

摘要

Curving paths Designing an immersive "world of dreams" that is as soft as possible, with gentle curves and a lot of vegetation, was the initial idea behind Kengo Kuma's design for a new private museum in Odense, Denmark's third largest city. It is dedicated to the world-famous fairy-tales by Hans Christian Andersen. Kuma, whose Olym-pia Stadium in Tokyo flickered across screens throughout the world in summer, is regarded as a figurehead of the new Japanese architecture: after years of elegant coolness and paper-thin ephemeral aesthetic his architecture stands for a return to warmth and surfaces with a tactile appeal. In the final round of the architecture competition for the new fairy-tale museum the Japanese team was the unanimous victor over the local heroes from BIG from Copenhagen. With the new museum Kuma proves once again that he can skilfully develop a "promenade architecturale" which seductively entices children and adults alike into the realm of fantasy. Band-like ramps lead visitors down a meandering path into the exhibition world of Andersen. The elegantly curved routes of this voyage recall Oscar Niemeyer's Museum in Niteroi. The narrowness of the winding route leads into the expansiveness of the large underground exhibition areas. This is how the spatial dramaturgy intends it. In the hall itself visitors can find their own paths. The director of the new museum, the literature scholar Henrik Luebker, even goes so far as to speak of the "emancipation of the visitor".