Bjarke Ingels and his team at BIG have helped create an incredible WWII memorial on the site of an underground bunker in Denmark. The project, entitled Tirpitz, is located in Blåvand and expands upon a small museum that had already been established in the same area. Since the museum is hidden beneath several folds of earth, you probably won’t be able to see it if you’re standing on the ground. These folds ramp up to create a kind of angular hill, only revealing the complex when looked down at from an aerial point of view. Billed by the firm as a “sanctuary in the sand that acts as a gentle counterbalance to the dramatic war history of the site,” the new construction houses four exhibition spaces, each of which has been themed to reflect an element of the region’s history.
The museum is outlined by a set of incisions made into the landscape above it, which together take on a quasi-cross shape when seen from above. These openings rest just above the walkways that lead to the center of the complex: an impressive outdoor courtyard around which the exhibition spaces are organized. Both the walkways and the courtyard have been elevated to allow visitors to look down through the museum’s glazed upper walls into the galleries below. The architects decided to give the new structure a clandestine feel to contrast it with the foreboding, concrete bunker next door. The bunker was originally built as part of Hitler?s Atlantic Wall, whose constructi...