Hf
House of Fairytales
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSON MUSEUM, Odense, Denmark
Design Team: Ben Ward, Randi Riggs, William Adams
Here, one’s perception of space, shape, interiority and time are challenged and enlivened to embody the spirit of wonder and play that lies at the root of all fantasy. The mechanism for achieving this lies in the use of optical and spatial constructions—theoretically known as “anamorphic projections”—that alternate between ambiguity and clarity: clear geometric forms are stretched, pierced and projected through the building and landscape in ways that create rhythmic glimpses of recognizable shapes as one travels throughout the site until one finally reaches key moments where fragments align and relationships between programmatic elements are revealed. The resultant experience is one of both visual expansion and cinematic flattening as distances and adjacencies are distorted. It is a value of the proposal that the site be conducive for wandering, exploration, and gathering of all types.
Theoretically, the proposal is rooted in an interest in perception of the fragment and the whole as alternating and mutually dependent experiences. By using this process to make space, readings emerge that are both real (physical) and perceived, experienced via procession. Architecturally, this translates into a methodology of both disjunction and smoothing--two ways of addressing the intersection of geometries—that both invoke a sense of wonder and transform one’s understanding of building from ‘static object’ to dynamic performance.