Helsingor is perhaps the most famous city in Denmark after Copenhagen. It owes its fame to the Kronborg Castle located here, better known as "Elsinore" - the scene of Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Since 1915, the castle houses the Danish Maritime Museum, presenting the history of the Danish navy from the Renaissance to the present day. Since Denmark has always been a very active maritime power, the supply of free exhibition space and storage facilities has long dried up, and the construction of a new building has become a necessity.
The project of the new museum was implemented within the framework of the Kulturhavn Kronborg project - a program for the restoration of Kronborg itself and a comprehensive reconstruction of the adjacent territory of the former port. The main task of this large-scale project was to “turn the page of the industrial history of the city and open a new one - cultural”. In other words, the reconstruction of the former docks, the creation of a pedestrian embankment and the construction of several new cultural objects were supposed to make Helsingor even more attractive for visiting tourists, offering them not only an acquaintance with the castle, but also an interesting pastime outside of it. First, a cultural center with a library and a game room was built on the shores of the Øresund Strait, and now the implementation of the museum has been completed. And if the center was located on the embankment itself, then the museum had to imperceptibly integrate into the urban fabric. BIG found a truly Solomon solution by locating the cultural institution in a former dry dock.
“Out of respect for Kronborg Castle, we had to make the new museum disappear in the literal sense of the word, but in order to make it attractive to visitors, we also had to create an unusual, functional public space around it,” explains Bjarke Ingels … The dock, buried 7 meters into the ground, was perfect for solving this dilemma. The galleries and halls of the museum are located below ground level along the outer perimeter of the dock, while the architects left the space for repairing ships intact, turning it into an open-air auditorium - a place that will not only serve as a platform for all kinds of cultural events, but also immediately immerse visitors into the world of shipbuilding, giving an idea of the true scale and proportions of ships.
Through this gigantic depression - the "urban abyss", as the architects themselves call the dock, three two-level bridges are thrown, which together form a spectacular zigzag. At ground level, bridges connect the opposite ends of the dock and also provide access to the museum from the embankment. On the lower levels of the bridges, some of the exhibitions are located, as well as a conference room. Completely transparent walls of these rooms allow visitors to feel like inside a "workshop", and in case of too bright sun, special curtains are provided.
And if at the “bottom” of the dock the architects preserved the original keelblocks - elements of the supporting devices intended for the installation of the ship, then on the upper “terrace” of the museum modern benches were created, the design of which, however, is also entirely related to the marine theme. Outwardly, these structures resemble docking bittens, in addition, they have different lengths - according to the authors themselves, an important message is encrypted in these round "dots" and "dashes", which can be read by those who are familiar with Morse code.
The work on transforming the former dock into a museum space took five whole years. The steel structures of the bridges, each weighing about 100 tons, were made in China and transported to Helsingor by sea on the largest cargo ship that has ever entered the port of this Danish city, and in order to be mounted on the construction site itself, the largest cranes in all of Northern Europe were needed.
