Architecture studio Snøhetta has completed an extension to Denmark's Ordrupgaard Museum, uniting the original country manor building and a 2005 Zaha Hadid addition with new subterranean galleries that make a sculptural protrusion into the landscape.
Located north of Copenhagen near the forest park Jægersborg Dyrehave, the Ordrupgaard Museum is dedicated to French and Danish art from the 19th and early 20th century.
Snøhetta's Ordrupgaard Museum extension is subterranean but partially protrudes into the landscape
Its original world war one-era building is a three-winged neoclassical country mansion that houses the permanent collection, while special exhibitions are presented in the adjacent Zaha Hadid-designed modern extension, which is made of glass and black lava concrete. Snøhetta's new addition links these two buildings with five new underground gallery spaces and several landscape interventions, all intended to provide a "holistic and continuous path" throughout the museum and its grounds.
The extension includes a semi-sunken area where people can sit
Three of the new gallery spaces are dedicated to one of the Ordrupgaard Museum's drawcards, its collection of French impressionistic paintings ? an art style that Snøhetta references in the section of the structure that can be seen from outside.
This steel-coated structure is cut into multiple facets that are polished in different directions. They create a play of light that the Norwegian architecture firm i...