Moesgård – a new cultural history museum

By Jan Skamby Madsen
Curator, Moesgård Museum

The work involved with planning the extension of Moesgård Museum has been in progress for several years. For some time, the current buildings have been inadequate for holding contemporary exhibitions, and they can no longer cope with the many activities at both the museum itself and the Institute of Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics at the University of Aarhus, which is also housed there.
The planning work has now entered a new phase. The museum board decided in May 2006 to initiate detailed project planning of a new exhibition building on the basis of an architectural design competition, the announcement of a winning project in October 2005 and the promise of substantial financial support from private foundations – VELUX FONDEN, VILLUM KANN RASMUSSEN FONDEN, Oak Foundation and Augustinus Fonden – for carrying out the construction work, as well as commitments from the public sector to cover increased running costs. We expect to make a start on the actual building work in early 2008, and have scheduled the opening of the new museum for spring 2011.

The way the site is located within the overall landscape.

This is the first time for many years that a new Danish cultural history museum has been built right from scratch. There have been extensions to existing museums, as well as new buildings specially designed to house spectacular finds, but cultural history museums in Denmark have otherwise been relegated to old (and thus – in many cases – listed) buildings, where the staff have had to do their best to mount exhibitions under the given conditions. Creating new exhibition rooms to display their collections has been a privilege normally reserved for the museums of art.
The new exhibition building will be located on a site that is currently a field just to the north of the manor house. The new building itself will extend over about 16,000 square metres, with a floor area amounting to approximately 11,000 square metres. In addition to housing museum exhibitions, lecture rooms and the Ethnographic Collections, the new building will include a large range of facilities designed to provide all-round services for visitors. Some of the rooms will be shared by the university and the museum, including the auditorium, drawing office, photographic laboratory, workshops and storeroom. And we have even included a special exhibition room for the exclusive use of students. By moving all exhibition activities out of the different manor house outbuildings, we will also be able to provide the university with some much-needed space.

Design competition

In April 2005, we invited architects to participate in a design competition for the new exhibition building. Promoting this competition was Moesgård Museum, in collaboration with the University of Aarhus and the Danish University and Property Agency. We selected seven architectural practices to participate in the competition, three of which we designated in advance, while the other four won a prequalification round published under EU rules. The firms of architects competing were Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects (USA), Tadao Ando Architects & Associates (Japan), Keith Williams Architects (UK), Team Snøhetta A/S (Norway), Henning Larsens Tegnestue A/S (Denmark), Kim Utzon Arkitekter ApS (Denmark) and Cubo Arkitekter A/S (Denmark).

Moesgård Museum – old and new.

The purpose of the competition was to get proposals for a new museum of archaeology and ethnography, designed to blend into a specific area to the north of the manor house complex. We included a number of different specifications in the comprehensive set of rules for the competition, including a description of how we wanted the building to be used in practice – and specifically requested that the invited architects take the surrounding landscape into account when selecting the exact location of the new building.
Moesgård Museum and the surrounding countryside are part of an unusually well-preserved cultural landscape with numerous prehistoric monuments still visible, including burial sites from different periods in antiquity and field systems dating back to both the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. The area also features all the hallmarks of manor house landscaping at its best. The wooded areas around Århus, including those near Moesgård, are among the most popular in Denmark, and are a favourite destination for local residents seeking to get away from the city. However, residential development in the southern part of the Municipality of Århus is going ahead at such a rate that, within the foreseeable future, Moesgård will no longer be situated outside the city. On the contrary, it will provide a breathing space in the midst of the urban sprawl extending southwards from what is now the city of Århus. This makes the placement of a new building in such a vulnerable countryside context all the more of a challenge, not to mention ensuring a harmonious relationship between the existing manor house complex and the new exhibition building. We also want the new museum building – both architecturally and in terms of layout and accessibility – to stand out as both an example and an exponent of innovative thinking as regards international museum buildings in general and cultural history museums in particular.

The winning project

The competition entries varied considerably, right from completely or partially underground buildings to large, monumental constructions that completely dominated the landscape. There were also enormous differences in the suggestions for how the exhibition areas were to be laid out. The entries were scrutinised by a jury and a group of consultants, with one crucial criterion in mind – that all the architectural and functional requirements were to be fulfilled within the financial parameters available.
The winner of the competition was Henning Larsens Tegnestue A/S. A feature of this entry is the roof surface, which will be covered with grass and project straight up out of the ground, enabling light to come in through the sides. The jury’s report included the following account: “The most important qualities lie in the earth concept and the imaginative architectural details of the main theme. This entry succeeds in enhancing the plain, bold configuration of the ground by means of recesses, openings, etc. that make the space under the green roof surface suitable for a variety of purposes. Compared with the other proposals based on building the museum into the terrain, the winning design provides a welcome airiness in the interior layout and its interconnection with the outdoors.”
The new building grows organically out of the rolling landscape, and very soon acquired the nickname “elfen mound”. It is a very refined building aesthetically, especially on account of how visible it is from the areas close by – not just when looking at it from Moesgård, but also when observed from the small tracks and woodland roads to the west and north.

The façade facing north.

Cross-section of the new design.

Exhibitions

One thing is an attractive new building, but something else entirely is how we manage to attract the interest of visitors to what we want to say in coming exhibitions. This amounts to a major challenge. The conventional way of mounting an exhibition is for architects and museum professionals to collaborate. By doing so, we achieve an exhibition that is not only aesthetically attractive, but also correct in scientific terms. However, we often leave out a particular point in the overall story – a form of storytelling that enables the visitor to identify with a certain situation.
In 2005, I had the opportunity to discuss exhibitions with the Irish author Seamus Heaney, who said something that could well be used as the heading for our way of going about the work involved in arranging exhibitions in the new museum facilities. It went something like this: “When you present something you have got to be able to say that this may not be the whole truth, but there is a lot of truth in it.” We have to dare to tell a story, an action that does not necessarily have all the facts in place from a scientific point of view. Just as when we reconstruct an historical situation in a model, and – by necessity – establish a correlation by adding elements that are not immediately justifiable, but that seem probable.
One way of opening up for this possibility is by applying modern information technology. In this respect, we have established research collaboration with the Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI) at the University of Aarhus. This enables us to study the opportunities available and make consistent use of digitally based media in our exhibitions.
We will divide our exhibitions into three main categories – Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Denmark, the Arabian Gulf and the Ethnographic Collections – based on research conducted by both the museum and the institute in the fields of archaeology and ethnography, and the comprehensive collections of artefacts associated with these studies.
We will build up the Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Denmark exhibition chronologically, but the focus of topics in the progressive storytelling will be on areas for which the museum has a specially strong basis. These include the famous Grauballe Man – the best-preserved bog body in the world – and the equally well-known large collection of weapon sacrifices from the Illerup Ådal excavations, which includes some of the oldest runes known. What is less well known is that Moesgård also has some of the most prominent Danish finds from the Old Stone Age, as well as important new finds from the early Bronze Age “mound people”. The Iron Age is extremely well represented in our collections, which feature several spectacular finds. We can also relate the story of the Viking Age and the early Middle Ages in great detail, based on comprehensive excavations in Århus.
A long-cherished desire has been to mount an exhibition telling the story of P. V. Glob’s legendary expeditions to the Arabian Gulf, which began in Bahrain in 1953. What attracted him to Bahrain were the 100,000 mysterious burial mounds. Glob took with him a gift for the reigning sheikh – a white hunting falcon from Greenland, which helped to open many doors, along with the sensational archaeological discoveries. Within just a few years, about a dozen sheikhdoms were incorporated into the work carried out at Moesgård Museum. These extended from Kuwait in the north via Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to Oman – 1,500 kilometres to the south-east. In the decades that followed, as many as 30 Danish archaeologists spent three months a year in the Gulf States, and hundreds of locals worked on the excavations. This is the most extensive Danish archaeological project ever carried out abroad, and the results of the excavations will be presented in a special exhibition section, in collaboration with the Gulf States.
Moesgård Museum also focuses considerable attention on ethnographic studies. The foundation for the Ethnographic Collections was laid in 1947, when the museum obtained part of the collection resulting from Henning Haslund-Christensen’s third Danish expedition to Central Asia. Further collections were acquired right up to the 1990s, leading to an outstanding presentation of nomadic cultures in Asia. The Ethnographic Collections have grown since the late 1940s, and currently consist of about 40,000 items, acquired in connection with fieldwork in regions that include Africa, the Arabian Gulf, Iran/Afghanistan/India/Pakistan, South-East Asia, the Pacific and South and Central America. In addition, we have comprehensive research archives and collections of photographs, film and sound recordings.

View from the roof.

The new Ethnographic Collections will be far from exclusively historical. but will combine exhibitions with items of topical interest and the hands-on participation of the people they are concerned with. We aim to promote cultural dialogue and exchange, which are crucial to our globalised, multicultural world. Up until well into the twentieth century, ethnographic museums had a virtual monopoly on the average person’s close contact with the big, wide world, but this is no longer the case. We now have TV, the Internet, films and unrestricted foreign travel, and what is considered global has become a mere matter of course in a way we could not have imagined just a few decades ago. An ethnographic museum must therefore take this “globalisation of everyday life” into account and incorporate it when planning activities.

In collaboration with the Department of Anthropology and Ethnography at the University of Aarhus and colleagues in Copenhagen, we are currently trying to establish a solid, consensual basis for our future ethnographic museum work. In 2005 – via a PhD project called “Within the museum machinery – an investigation of current ethnographic exhibitions” – we were able to acquire the services of an ethnographer to help with our planning work. This project draws inspiration from ethnographic museums in Europe and North America, and considers what aspects can be useful as far as we are concerned. We also hold a number of workshops with colleagues and the anthropologist Inger Sjørslev from the University of Copenhagen, who coordinates activities. She also provides inspiration regarding how anthropological research and the activities of an ethnographic museum can be considered jointly and create interest in modern society.

In the year ahead, we will complete our detailed project planning, so that we can invite tenders for the actual building work. We have erected signs on the future building site north of Moesgård to provide information about the project. We have also marked out the corners of the new building in the field, as well as erecting a pair of towers to indicate the position and height of the main entrance to the new museum.

By Jan Skamby Madsen