BIG

Natural History Museum . Copenhagen

BIG

How do you approach an existing built heritage without ending up with a classic dichotomy between the old versus the new?

Rather than trying to add new buildings to existing structures, we propose to add a man-made landscape of stones to the existing buildings in the Botanical Garden. The new Natural History Museum’s architecture will not compete with the existing built heritage. We propose a Natural History Museum as a man-made mineral landscape that naturally adapts to the historic buildings and their stone pavings and the organic forms of the Botanical Garden - a Geological Garden of building and landscape.
The new museum extension in the Botanical Garden requires a synthesis crisscrossing between urban form, architecture and landscape design, science, storytelling, communication and research. As a form of architectural disorder rather than a collection of detached buildings, the new Natural History Museum combines building and landscape, history and innovation, surprise and explanation, research and narrative.
Natural History Museum is a museum for the substances our earth is composed of and the living organisms that inhabit it. In short, everything from the animal kingdom, plant kingdom and mineral kingdom in an incredible span across all scales. How do you create a framework for the story about the origin of the universe along the story of life’s conception, birth and death? The formation of geometry as a common denominator across disciplines and scales occurs as the connective tissue between geology, zoology, botany and architecture. From carbon atoms to cliff rock, from the cell structure in a beech leaf to the neck of a giraffe, it can be observed how our physical world across the organic and inorganic consists of simple geometric structures combined to bigger structures. We propose a Natural History Museum built on the same basic geometric principles as found in our own cell structure, the life around us and our physical surroundings.

partner in charge: Bjarke Ingels, Andreas Pedersen
project leader:Jakob Henke
team: Frederik Lyng . Ryohei Koike . Ricardo Palma . Karol Borkowski . Alina Tamosiunaite . Teresa Fernandez Rojo . Martin Jonsbæk Nielsen

collaborators: AKT II, Wissenberg, Vogt Landscape, Space Syntax London, Kvorning Design og Kommunikation, Davis Langdon (AECOM), LUXIGON