Museum Center Blåvand integrates 4 independent institutions – a bunker museum, an amber museum, a histolarium and a special exhibitions gallery – in an exhibition landscape embedded in the dunes. As the antithesis to the heavy volume of the bunker, the museum appears as the intersection between a series of precise cuts in the landscape. A block in the landscape – and a corresponding absence of the dune.

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

• Architects: BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group
• Project: BLÅVAND BUNKER MUSEUM
• Location: Varde, Denmark
• Code: MCB
• Date: 09/05/2012
• Program: Culture
• Status: In Progress
• Size in m2: 2500
• Project type: Commission
• Client: The Museum of Varde City and Vicinity
• Collaborators: AKT

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

The bunker’s gun is restored as a ghost or a reflection of the war machine it was meant to be. As a crystal artifact in “wireframe” – the cannon is re-created in glass and steel framing – it is a skylight over the raw setting of the bunker where visitors can experience the strategic position the gun would have played in the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall.

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

The new architecture is at once critical and respectful of the existing bunkers. As an antithesis – vacuum rather than volume – transparency rather than gravity – it represents the new architecture of a light and easy antithesis of bunker architecture.

Simultaneously, both the glass cannon and invisible museum will add sensitively to the existing landscape and nature which only on closer inspection – a walk in the dunes, or a visit to the bunker – unfolds for visitors.

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group

Image Courtesy © BIG-Bjarke Ingels Group