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BIG Designs Innovative New National Gallery for Greenland

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We have covered the visionary architecture of BIG here before, their extraordinary waste-to-energy building with a ski slope on top has to be one of the odder pieces of architecture around.

Greenland’s new National Gallery provides yet another example of their weird and lovely architecture.

Together with the team TNT Nuuk + Ramboll Nuuk + Architekti, they have just won a competition to design the new museum in the capital city of Nuuk.  The clear shape of the gallery appears more like a sculpture or a piece of land‐art.

The fjordland setting in the extraordinary landscape of Greenland drove the unusual design. “The Danish functionalistic architecture in Nuuk is typically square boxes which ignore the unique nature of Greenland,” says

“We therefore propose a national gallery which is both physically and visually in harmony with the dramatic nature, just like life in Greenland is a symbiosis of the nature”.

In whatever season it is viewed, the museum seems like an alien spacecraft that has just touched down. You want to investigate closer.

For families in the snowbound land, an imaginative community center like this museum has to be a real treat, opening minds, as only art can.

The design brief? Tuusi Josef Motzfeldt, one of the gallery’s board members said, “Our dream is an institution that stimulates our curiosity, awake our excitement with its thought‐provoking design and where we all feel at home.”

I think they got it.