A new Hans Christian Andersen museum is due to open this summer in Odense, where the world-famous Danish author was born. The aim of H.C. Andersen’s House is to rethink how the story of the fairytale writer’s life and work is told.
Andersen died in 1875 and is known for timeless tales like The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Nightingale, The Princess and the Pea, The Little Mermaid, Thumbelina and The Little Match Girl. Architects Kengo Kuma and Associates have taken inspiration from the fairytale, The Tinderbox, for H.C. Andersen’s House. “The idea behind the architectural design resembled Andersen’s method, where a small world suddenly expands to a bigger universe,” explains Kengo Kuma.
The immersive, artistic space aims to evoke the feeling of stepping into Andersen’s fairytales using architecture, sound, light and a stream of images. The gardens and buildings cover an area of approximately 9000 square meters, and the exhibition leads to his actual childhood home. The main building houses a café and visitor facilities, and there’s a children’s house and underground museum, which intertwines with a surrounding magical garden.
”Hans Christian Andersen’s artistic universe is fantastic, because it reverses how you imagine this world you thought you knew, but without putting anything else in its place,” says the museum’s creative director, Henrik Lübker. “His fairytales do not point towards a universal truth, but rather into the open – towards the peculiarity and multiplicity of the world. In the new museum, we maintain this ambiguity by using Andersen’s own artistic strategies as the starting point for how the garden, the house and the exhibition have all been shaped, as well as for the many artistic contributions that will also be part of the museum.”
Further information on H.C. Andersen’s House can be found on its website here.
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