House of Fairytales

New museum for the fairy tales writer H.C. Andersen in his hometown

Odense, Denmark

The Paper Cutting Strategy

As Andersen himself states, paper cutting was a very powerful creative tool to shape his tales. In the same way, we propose paper cutting as a tool to shape our proposal. A big garden is laid out on top of the site, and, as if it was a large green sheet of paper, it is then cut and molded. The cuts are where garden and building come into relation: the entrance lobby, the café, the shop; a green courtyard between the building and the neighboring houses; a sunken planted courtyard as a façade for the underground parking transfer area and its accesses to the garden on top. A second level of filegree cutting forms the network of paths and the paper cut shaped flower beds.

Above, an urban garden
Below, a fantasy world

Hans Christian Andersen was born in a charming neighborhood in the historic center of Odense, where his birth house is still preserved. Attached to it, and partly surrounding a public garden, a museum and a cultural center currently present the author’s life and work. The challenging assignment calls for a substantial enlargement of both garden and museum, but on the very same location they now occupy. Our answer is to cover the whole site with a large Fairytale Garden, and to put under it most of the new museum: the House of Fairytales. In this way, both public space and museum can be maximized without conflicting.

The Fairytale Garden

The Fairytale Garden, with its forest, its pond, and its paper cut shaped flower beds, is inspired by Andersen’s fantasy world, while the medicinal plants and trees to be used are drawn from the memory of the site, where an old apothecary garden once stood. Interplaying with the physical garden, a virtual layer, freely accessible through all smart mobile electronic devices, offers an additional gateway to Andersen’s world. We can gain insight about the paper cuts meaning, about the apothecary plants and the history of the site, and Andersen’s tales characters interact in real time with the garden.

The House of Fairytales

The House of Fairytales is a journey into Andersen’s universe, and it features two worlds: the Fairytales World (under the Fairytale Garden) and the Treasure World (at ground floor level, around the house where Andersen was born). The Fairytales World is where we discover the most famous fairytales, through an immersive, state-of-the-art, playful and didactic experience.

The Treasure World revolves around Andersen’s birth house, and is where we can enlarge and deepen the first knowledge of Andersen’s life and work.
The Treasure World and The Fairytales World are bound together by big lift and a large light shaft, where two slides intertwine around a palm tree. Drawn from Andersen’s paper cuts, the palm tree is an icon, which refers to his extensive travelling along the Mediterranean.

The Tinderbox. An Interactive Exploration Kit

In order to engage the visitors and to give a solid thread to the experience, we propose to provide both children and adults with a small interactive exploration kit: the Tinderbox. For it, we draw inspiration from Andersen’s fairytale “The Tinderbox”, where the tinderbox is a box with magic objects that can fulfill their owner’s wishes. In the same way, the Tinderbox we propose is a small container of interactive objects that trigger experiences in each of the tales featured in the The Fairytales World. The shape of each object is inspired by a key object present in each tale.

The Fairytales World

Located under the Fairytale Garden, The Fairytales World is the main gateway to Andersen’s fantasic universe. Every tale has a dedicated area, accessed through The Fairytales Hall, a big and bright underground space, inspired by the “large hall (beneath the tree) with many hundred lamps” that appears in “The Tinderbox” fairytale.

The Treasure World

Located at ground level, the Treasure World is a place for discovery and understanding where we can interactively complete and deepen the knowledge of Andersen’s life and work that we have already gained in The Fairytales World. Through the following sections, we learn more about Andersen’s life and discover some of his hidden literary and artistic jewels: Andersen’s Times, The Picture Gallery, The Library, The Birth House, The Drawing Room, The Workshop, The Memorial Hall, ”To travel is to live” and The Diary. 

From an architectural point of view, we propose to scrupulously preserve the buildings that are required to be kept, and to replace the others by new buildings that archeologically reconstruct the historic street fronts, as stepping back towards Andersen’s Odense is a crucial part of the experience.

Project name

H.C. Andersen Museum – House of Fairytales

Location

Odense, Denmark

Client

Odense City Council

Year

2016

Status

Competition

Program

Museum

Gross built area: 6.275m2

Author

Eduard Balcells Architecture+Urbanism+Landscape

Honorata Grzesikowska, Balbina Mateo, Marcos Ruiz, Joan Gallego, Imma Subías, Sara M.Huntingford, Eberhard Schmidl, Andrés Lupiáñez (architects, co-authors)

Collaborators

Scenography: Enpublic - Noèlia Asensi, Marina Esmeraldo, architects