One of Denmark’s most highly publicized cultural projects has now officially begun its public operation after being previously inaugurated in a soft opening last June.

Set amongst a massive new public park that opened earlier in the fall, Kengo Kuma and Associates’ design for the new H.C.Andersen Hus museum in Odense is a “fantasy world” of interconnected circular forms which give shape to the museum’s more than 60,000 square feet of education centers and subterranean exhibition space.

Visitors can experience the physical dualities endemic in the architecture and inspired by classic Andersen tales like The Tinderbox and The Little Mermaid. After entering through an extension of the writer’s adjacent birth home, they begin their journey on the timber-clad upper level and descend into an unraveling underground labyrinth containing a “unique artistic experience” designed by Event Communications dotted with evocative commissions from artists like Henrique Oliveira and Sandra Rilova. Lewis Gibson also contributed to the sound design for the museum. 

“The museum spaces are composed of a series of circular forms that are tangent to each other like a chain,” said KKAA partner in charge Yuki Ikeguchi. “In the sequence of intertwined spaces, visitors will find themselves in between outside and inside as the green wall appears and disappears. The journey of the museum would be the narrative, the elements of his work; duality of the opposite, dissolving the boundary, will be read through spatial composition and the ambiguity.”

Once outside again, the dichotomy between fantasy and real life is even further drawn out by local landscapers MASU Planning. The meandering maze of gardens they created illustrates Andersen’s centering of nature and the human experience while, at the same time, binding together the museum’s two dominant elements using a wayfinding hedge which also serves to elevate the human scale of the entire project. 

Overall, this is a complex in tune with its context in the city. The Kuma team took very careful consideration to the surrounding developments and mixed character of the city’s historic old center. The result is a destination for the whole country which perfectly encapsulates the complexity of one of Scandinavia's most important literary icons.