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Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Lolland, Denmark

Unlike the location of an urban museum that is reached through the room-like spaces of a city, visiting Fuglsang entails a long journey through open countryside to a country estate set in a broad agricultural landscape.

The new building was placed to one side of the view in line with the land steward’s house to create connection with the landscape. A second principle was for the building to be as abstract as possible while maintaining connections with the earlier buildings around it. Like the buildings around the courtyard – and many classic works of Danish modernism - the museum’s facades are constructed from brick.

The exhibition spaces, which are arranged as three suites around the central gallery, are places where groups of visitors can spread out and immerse themselves in the collection. Abstract and reconfigurable, this tall space is naturally lit through a ceiling of open metal grids, above which there is space to support suspended artworks and projectors. These spaces are connected by the central gallery, which is neither simply an exhibition space nor a place of circulation. At the end is a room where visitors can rest and reflect.

The different characters of the galleries and public spaces were developed empirically and are bound together like the buildings of Fuglsang itself, through simple similarities. In this way, and through the loss and recovery of the view of landscape and sea that occurs within the museum, some underlying qualities of the locale are introduced to the quiet, top-lit interior. Our intention is for the museum to be filled with slight differences that are stimulating but unobtrusive, so that the art not the building predominates, and for there to be a combination of familiarity and emptiness that allows the building to become the imaginative property of those who encounter it.

http://www.tonyfretton.com/fuglsang.htm