27
BUILDING PROJECTS
WADDEN SEA CENTRE RIBE, DENMARK
A sculpture in straw
James Parker reports on the new visitor centre designed by architect Dorte Mandrup to provide a historic affinity with its protected coastal location, while also offering some strong new design statements of its own
Denmark, providing an often dramatically bleak, flat landscape but also playing a vital role in supporting wildlife. As many as 15 million birds migrating south from the arctic tundra make what is often their only stop here to feed at low tide, and the area’s importance has led to it being protected with UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 2014.
T
The new visitors centre designed by Danish architect Dorte Mandrup displays her practice’s flair for using natural materi- als in new and often sculptural ways, but also a combination of creativity and subtlety to make the building sit happily in its context. Both of these traits were highly beneficial in realising the resulting striking yet subtle form, topped by an angled thatch roof, in its prominent seaside location a few miles from Denmark’s oldest town, Ribe. With the Wadden Sea having been home to large populations of Vikings, the new design is on one level an attempt to provide a more faithful interpretation of the Viking farmhouse-around-a courtyard typology than that offered by the previous three-wing centre built on this site in the 1990s. According to Dorte Mandrup the building that hers largely replaces was an unsuccessful mish-mash: “Everything was a bit out of proportion, and the red roof and white exterior of the brick buildings was not really in the tradition of the area. It was more like a city house.” The architects were keen to provide something which was more in keeping with the area and provided a more fitting reinterpretation of the region’s architectural heritage.
ADF MAY 2017
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK
he Wadden Sea is a vast coastal wetland stretching from the Netherlands to north western
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
