Activate, Generate, Integrate!

Modern Art Museum & Cultural Square / Kristiansand, Norway

2016

Distinction / Purchase, International Architectural Competition
Commentdation, AR MIPIM Future Projects Awards 2017
Selected as Best Project by judge Sou Fugimoto, DOMES AWARDS 2017

Surface: 12.500 sqm of built space

Urban regeneration of the surrounding area with housing and cafes and conversion of an old silo to a Museum of Modern Art.

On the urban level, this is a competition about how to activate the area, how to generate focus, centrality and density of use, how to integrate the new cultural centre to the Cultural Path.

Our planning concept is: activate, generate, integrate!

For the Museum, we imagined grain falling from above, filling up the silo tubes. Grain, a precious commodity, then. And now? Light: a precious commodity for the museum of modern art. What is more suitable to talk about time than light itself with its ever-changing qualities?

We imagined a huge crane that fills the silo with light. We decided to capture light and let it fill up the silo. The extreme verticality of the tubes carries within the qualities of an ‘industrial cathedral’. We imagined light beams activating the space in the interior, and giving new presence to the silo as the reflections and translucencies of the new additions.