Moesgård Museum | Henning Larsen

The museum is not only a striking landmark, visible from both land and sea, but will also be a world class museum experience when it opens to visitors in 2014. Architecture, nature, culture and history will fuse together into a total experience, and the museum’s many years of exhibition experience and research will be drawn upon in a new approach to the presentation of cultural history. Moesgård Museum will take new angles on Denmark’s history from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages and turn an innovative anthropological eye on the peoples of the world. The new museum appears fully integrated into the cultural landscape south of Aarhus. With its distinctive architecture and its stunning natural setting in Skåde Bakker, the building will become a major tourist attraction in itself. The rectangularly shaped roof plane seems to grow out of the landscape and during summer it will form an area for picnics, barbeques, lectures and traditional Midsummer Day’s bonfires. Come winter snowfall, the sloping roof will become transformed into the city’s best toboggan run. The interior of the building is designed like a varied terraced landscape inspired by archaeological excavations gradually uncovering history, layer by layer. The visitor can move through a vivid sequence of exhibitions and scientific experiments – like a traveller in time and space. The museum is currently preparing new exhibitions and will open again to the public in October 2014.