“If you look at the exhibited projects individually, they might not seem directly connected, but together they express the contextual abundance that derives from allowing the place to inform the architecture – a richness in materiality, form, and function. In a time where we as humans have become a profound force of nature, it is increasingly important that architecture conveys something contextually unique and enhances the understanding and experience of each place. Not only when it comes to sensitive landscapes, but also the social, cultural, or economic framework.”
Dorte Mandrup, Founder and Creative Director.
Wadden Sea Centre by Dorte Mandrup. Photograph by Adam Mørk.
Dorte Mandrup was little known in 2003 when she won the competition launched by the Copenhagen City Council to design a sports centre in the northern district of Amager. The new equipment was part of a plan to revitalize an area, which is separated by a narrow stretch of sea from the centre of the Danish capital and made up of old industrial estates and workers' housing. The contest proposed the project to give the youth of the neighbourhood an opportunity and regenerate the area on the site of a parking lot where drug traffickers had their headquarters. Her building has become a beacon of the neighbourhood, which has since substantially improved and somewhat gentrified.
Dorte Mandrup does not believe that architecture has a definitive effect on transforming society (she does not believe that new facilities are driving semi-delinquents to sign up for sports), but she does believe that with a new, beautiful and well-designed building, you can improve your daily life, get together and feel free, simply protected by an envelope capable of giving you hope for the future.
Dorte Mandrup. Portrait by Tuala Hjarno.
The meaning of place
Through a series of site-specific installations and a rich Wunderkammer of materials, artefacts, and records, the exhibition illustrates the interplay between the character of the place and the buildings that emerge from them – from the yellow-brown marshes of the Wadden Sea to the breathtakingly vast scale of the Arctic and the uncomfortable memories of war, flight and expulsion imprinted in the ruins of Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof. Each model is an artistic expression of the important connection between place and architecture. Like small cabinets of curiosities, they invite visitors to explore the local narratives that have formed them.
Dorte Mandrup is internationally renowned for creating engaging architecture that emphasises the strong interrelation between the buildings and the communities or landscapes they are part of. The new exhibition will present five of the studio’s unique projects and tell a story of architecture’s poetic significance and its ability to be the physical space that creates community and heightens the attention to the distinct qualities of context.
Among the projects that can be seen in detail in the exhibition are; the Wadden Sea Interpretation Center, "The Whale", a cultural building in Norway about whales, the Berlin Exile Museum competition, the Fjord Center Ilulissat ice cream or a renovation bunker such as the Wadden Sea World Heritage Association Trilateral Center in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, among others.
Dorte Mandrup ganadora para construir "The Whale", un edificio cultural en Noruega sobre las ballenas. Imgen por MIR.
Dorte Mandrup winner to build "The Whale", a Cultural Building in Norway. Imgae by MIR.
