Museum of Copenhagen

The New Museum of Copenhagen and new permanent exhibition is placed within three floors of the original grade I listed 1893 H.J.Holm that establishes the museum as a new focal point of the city’s cultural heritage quarter. The ambition of the design is to create an environment that reaches out to the city and places the new Museum of Copenhagen as a space where Copenhageners and guests of the city feel at home, where their stories are told, and where the different exhibitions cultivate, move, inspire, and create a platform for debate. The exhibition design is conceived as a communicative collage of objects, light, colour, and people. The display cases, fixtures, and interiors in the permanent exhibitions are lightweight with minimal interventions and clean material choices that complement the original richly ornamented interior. The use of reflective surfaces are designed to reflect and mirror the original vivid colours of the interior walls, ornamented ceilings and the guests themselves. The permanent exhibitions are arranged according to the concept of chronotope. Moving through the exhibitions, one moves through both different places and spaces in the city and through time periods that give the essence of the city in the museum as well as connects the museum to the city’s boroughs and people. A central staircase including stained-glass motifs by Agnes Slott-Møller, is the backbone of the museum’s new exhibitions. Here a new lighting installation leads visitor up through the building with a vertical structure holding fixtures and an array of hand-blown glass discs that reflect light and guide guests through the museum. Located on the Museum’s top floor, The Copenhagen Panorama, is a total installation that speaks to all the senses and revolves around the 24m2 large city model of Copenhagen, as it appears in 2020. The elliptical 6x4 metre cast model in the scale 1:750 is placed centrally in the room and is a tactile interactive experience that allows insights into the city flows, density and progression over time. The ambition of the Copenhagen Panorama has been to create a poetic as well as a rational image of Copenhagen. The model is staged in a space where light and sound change subtly, precise statistics and data of the city’s development are presented as well as transport, lifestyle and habits of the Copenhageners are displayed. The materiality of the design reflects the city’s volatility but also the stability and weight that history and the city itself manifests. Through the model and total exhibition experience, it is possible to both explore and to be surprised by the unknown as well as recognise the buildings and city squares that make Copenhagen the city that people know today.