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A Dialogue Between Architecture, Art, and the Danish Landscape

The Calder Terrace at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Image by Von Chua.

Arriving at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside Copenhagen, Denmark, I found the museum quieter and more intimate than the photographs I have seen. The buildings are smaller in the flesh than I had pictured, and so is the artwork itself, a scale that felt less like a statement and more like an invitation. My favourite part of the visit, in the end, was not any single gallery but the garden: the way the site opens onto the Øresund, the water doing as much of the work as the architecture.

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art takes its name, oddly, from its first owner, Alexander Brun, who married three women all called Louise; when the collector and publisher Knud W. Jensen bought the estate in 1955, he kept the toponym rather than replace it with his own. Jensen's ambition for the site was simple - to provide the Danes an opportunity to see modern art in a museum setting. In 1956, he asked the architects Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert to build a museum around the old villa. The brief that Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert received, in Jensen's own words, was a site that “made its own demands and became in a sense our employer, making the final decisions about where the buildings should stand.”

Bo and Wohlert's response was to connect the villa to a sequence of low, glazed pavilions so that a visit feels less like entering a building, but more like continuing a walk that happens to pass by sculptures and paintings along the way. It is a “covered stroll” through the park. The design idiom - whitewashed walls, laminated timber ceilings, deep-red tiled floors, and long glass panels opening onto the Øresund, drew on two unrelated traditions at once: the Bay Area wooden houses Wohlert encountered while studying at Berkeley, and the restrained simplicity of Japanese buildings, transplanted, as the museum describes it, “elegantly in a Danish setting.” Having experienced it myself, I now understand the description; nothing about the scale of the museum demands your attention, but that is precisely why the pleasant experience lingers in the back of my mind.

Making my way to the Calder Terrace, situated right outside the Louisiana Cafe, I had expected the large Calder stabile on the terrace facing the sea to dominate its setting, a big gesture in a big garden. It doesn't. Instead, it sits at something closer to human scale, and the surprise of that, standing on the Calder Terrace with the ocean beyond it, told me more about Bo and Wohlert's instincts than any amount of reading beforehand. At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, design restraint is the design decision.

Standing in the garden, I found myself thinking about other museums built into landscape rather than against it. From the Fondation Beyeler outside Basel in Germany, Monet's garden at Giverny in France, to Dia Beacon on the Hudson in the US, I thought that Jensen might have referenced one of them. After a quick search on dates, I confirmed that he couldn't have. This is because the Fondation Beyeler opened in 1997 and Dia Beacon in 2003, both close to half a century after the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Giverny, though Monet had gardened there since the 1880s, was not opened to the public as a museum until 1980, by which point Louisiana was already in its third decade. If there is a lineage of landscape-first, human-scaled museums, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art sits near its beginning, not at the end of it. Was Knud W. Jensen the pioneer in the landscape-first, human-scaled museums?

Besides that, it is also notable how the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art was allowed to grow. Rather than one completed masterpiece, the museum has been built in seven phases since 1958: the North Wing, the West Wing and Concert Hall, the South Wing, the East Wing, the Children's Wing, a 2003-2006 technical modernisation, and a 2018 refresh for its sixtieth anniversary. Each phase was carried out by Bo and Wohlert or their successor Claus Wohlert, and each was set into the terrain to preserve the original low profile. Over sixty years of continuity with the same architectural hand is not a brief many clients would sign up for today, but it is, arguably, why the place still reads as one cohesive place rather than a campus of additions. Perhaps this explains why it felt, to me, more intimate than its reputation.

Three exhibitions were on when I visited, and they make an interesting set against that architecture. Three very different exhibitions, conceptual and text-based, maximalist and political, and classically figurative, sit within the quiet, glazed shell without any one of them overwhelming the architecture. That is not an accident; a building conceived as a stroll through a park, rather than a sequence of white cubes competing for attention, seems able to hold almost anything a curator puts inside it. It raises a fair question for anyone briefing a cultural project: are we designing galleries that flatter a single opening exhibition, or spaces patient enough to still make sense of whatever comes next in fifty years?

I went to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art expecting to experience large scale and came away impressed by restraint instead, by a garden that does not perform for you, and a Calder that does not need to be bigger to hold a view of the ocean. That is, I think, the real lesson to bring home: generosity of site does not require generosity of gesture.