Jellingestenene Visitor Centre

This project was a response to an international competition for a structure that would protect, interpret and preserve the Viking-era carved runestones – Jellingstenene – in Jutland, Denmark.

We suggested that critical questions should be asked of the site and its history, and that the lessons learnt from these enquiries might constitute the project. A dilemma emerged in the tension between the idea of housing the stones in a museum or display case (as the winning scheme ended up doing) and perhaps a more sophisticated way of retaining the stones on their site and incorporating them into a larger instrument. In this decision lies the tension between the value of the material object itself and those of the relations between the objects and their histories.

The result was an enclosure that connected all these layers: extruding the church anteroom, expanding an enclosure around the stones, and extending up the structure to make a periscope-like tower.