STATUS
IDEA
CLIENT
Nunatta Eqqumiitsulianik Saqqummersitsivia
TYPOLOGY
Culture
SIZE M2/FT2
3,000 / 32,292
SHARE
Greenland National Gallery for Art will play a significant role for the citizens of Greenland and the inhabitants of Nuuk as a cultural, social, political, urban and architectural focal point. The building will combine the art history of Greenland and contemporary art in one dynamic institution that communicates the continuous project of documenting and developing the Greenlandic national identity through art and culture.
Located on a steep slope overlooking the most beautiful of Greenland’s fjords, the 3,000 m2 National Gallery will serve as a cultural and architectural icon for the people of Greenland.
LOOP
— The exhibition is designed as a loop of galleries with great flexibility and various possibilities.
GLACIER
— The loop follows the natural landscape and forms a melted ring as a geometric
simplification of a metaphor to glaciers and drifting snow.
VIEW / FOCAL POINT
— The melted ring acts as a framework for an outdoor sculpture garden: the
fusion of culture and nature, an internal exterior, the museum’s focal point.
The slope of the internal courtyard opens up, so both courtyard and museum
get a poetically framed view of the majestic fjord.
EXHIBITION
— The exhibition provides a common gallery space which can be subdivided
according to different ways of curation.
ADMINISTRATION & OUTREACH
— Administration and outreach facilities are incorporated into a mezzanine level between the exhibition space and public foyer with a direct connection to more
public functions at both ends: an auditorium to the west and a reading room to the east.
NUUK_Diagram_Axonometric-06 pm
— All side functions are concentrated in a central core inheriting workshops and
storage space.
As a projection of a geometrically perfect circle on to the steep slope, the new gallery is conceived as a courtyard building that combines a pure geometrical layout with a sensitive adaption to the landscape. The three‐dimensional imprint of the landscape creates a protective ring around the museum’s focal point, the sculpture garden where visitors, personnel, exhibition merge with culture and nature, inside and outside.
“The Board has a clear vision: to work for the establishment of an internationally oriented highly professional institution that communicates the continuous project of documenting and developing the Greenlandic national identity through art and culture. Our dream is a national gallery where historic and contemporary art meets circumpolar pieces, Nordic and world art in general. Our dream is an institution that stimulates our curiosity, awake our excitement with its thought‐provoking design and where we all feel at home. Selecting a prominent architect as BIG, I am sure that our chances of realizing that dream are good.”
“The Danish functionalistic architecture in Nuuk is typically square boxes which ignore the unique nature of Greenland. We therefore propose a national gallery which is both physically and visually in harmony with the dramatic nature, just like life in Greenland is a symbiosis of the nature. We have created a simple, functional and symbolic shape, where the perfect circle is supplied by the local topography which creates a unique hybrid between the abstract shape and the specific location.”
Bjarke Ingels Andreas Klok Pedersen Jakob Henke Ji-Young Yoon Lars Thonke Tore Banke Tristan Battistoni Tyrone Cobcroft Gül Ertekin Aleksander Tokarz Alessio Zenaro Daniel Selensky Johan Cool Nicklas Antoni Rasch Oanh Nguyen Jacques Zhang
COLLABORATORS
TNT Nuuk
Arkitekti
Rambøll UK
Rambøll Nuuk
MIR
Glessner Group
