Norway’s new Kunstsilo Museum has opened to the public in the southern port city of Kristiansand.
The new home for the private collection of Nicolai Tangen is the product of a six-year transformation authored by Spanish studios Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, Mendoza Partida, and BAX in a former grain silo (hence the name) and integrates the Southern Norway Art Museum’s holdings seamlessly into one space that covers three floors and yields a total of 3,300 square meters (35,520 square feet) for exhibitions and cultural programming.
The overhaul of Arne Korsmo and Sverre Aasland’s original 1935 functionalist design evokes both the Tate Modern in London and Thomas Heatherwick’s popular 2017 reimagining of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa.
Inside, the collection of around 5,500 objects is presented in 25 galleries surrounding a large (69-foot) central atrium to either side. The new space still brings to mind its former industrial character, offset by a corrugated white aluminum finish on its exterior and completed on top with a new glass-enclosed viewing platform and bar.
“It was always meant to be a museum-like collection, which means that you want to have the most important artists, and you want to have the most important work,” Tangen told Bloomberg in a preview. “There needs to be a nerve center and a meaning.”
The best hope, as Bloomberg mentions, is for Kunstsilo to have a catalytic ‘Bilbao effect’ on the region known for being traditionally dependent on offshore oil and commercial fisheries for economic vitality.
It joins the new National Museum of Norway and Munch Museum as the three largest cultural sector projects to be completed in the country within the past three years.
2 Comments
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Inside and out, this could stand on its own as a contemporary design, yet it maintains the character and forms of the old grain silo. As a form it is striking and coherent, yet as a type wonderfully ambiguous. This could be a church—and makes a deeply expressive museum.
And it is subtle and understated. The Heatherwick museum is overwrought.
I'd like to see a rendering of the silos painted different bright colors, as might have been expected, only to understand why it had to be white.
I'd be curious to see a ranking of top conversions, for comparison.
Grain silos were an inspiration for early modernists so it's kind of fitting.
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