The winning design of the Danish Maritime Museum by BIG

On Friday, September 14, 2007, the results of the public competition for the Danish Maritime Museum in Helsingør were announced in Copenhagen. The Copenhagen studio BIG won the competition for the new museum. The museum, covering an area of 5000 m², is planned to be located in the harbor, where an abandoned dry dock (150m long, 25m wide, and 9m deep) is situated. The concrete dock for ship repairs lies in sight of Kronborg Castle, which is on the UNESCO World Heritage list and is also the setting for Shakespeare's play Hamlet. The new museum will not obstruct the view of the castle, as it does not rise above the terrain. The authors of the winning design admit: "We considered that it would be an architectural suicide to fill the dry dock with exhibition displays. Therefore, we decided to leave it empty, and the museum literally wraps around it. The empty dock thus becomes the centerpiece of the entire museum. We left it open to become a new urban space accessible to all new ideas and communal living. The attraction of the underwater oasis is its emptiness." A series of bridges will run through this emptiness, one of which will also lead to the museum. Visitors will thus dive deeper and deeper into the history of Danish seafaring until they finally stand under the open sky at the bottom of the dry dock.
The museum, costing 130 million Danish kroner, is expected to be completed in 2010.