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A time machine on a significant historic site
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.
- TYPE Public
- LOCATION Jellinge | DK
- YEAR 2009
- WITH
APPROACH
"Instruments" Diagram
Program
Consolidation and Extension
Adjustment
Periscope
Resolution
Our approach was to design an instrument that connected, explained and asked questions of the complex history on site. The history could be crudely categorised as a series of material transformations from stones, mounds, a church, a park, roads and a village, each of which ignored any value in the previous elements. For example, the burying of the stone Viking ship, the construction of the mounds and the addition of the church have all served to disrupt previous understandings of the site, even while suggesting new ones. Our key intervention - a periscope - announces the fusion of a choreographic approach with a psychospatial one. The periscope is a series of devices, mirrors, openings that allow visitors to slide back and forth in time – if time were marked by the various configurations of the stones in their context.
GALLERY
DRAWINGS
