Wadden Sea Centre, Denmark | Dorte Mandrup
sponsored by Domani
The new Melides collection designed by Vincent Van Duysen
“Good architecture creates the good life. Great art makes us better people. It makes us reflect on our lives and how we act in the world.” (Dorte Mandrup)
In Perfect Harmony
Seemingly ascending from the melancholic marshlands and soft billowy dunes of the Wadden Sea National Park, a 500-kilometre-long Danish coastal area formed by the ice age some 12,000 years ago, is a building so intertwined with the landscape that it is hard to imagine one without the other.
The Wadden Sea Centre, the gateway for visitors wishing to explore the UNESCO World Heritage site that is the Wadden Sea National Park, is a prime example of Danish architect Dorte Mandrup’s ability to root her works in the local surroundings and natural sceneries while adding a profoundly artistic, forward-looking element to them. The asymmetrical thatched roofs and facades, built using local building traditions, draw upon the layout of traditional four-winged farmhouses and utilise locally sourced construction materials. The line that forms the top of the roof lies in perfect parallel with the North Sea’s infinite horizon.
Using materiality and form to tell a story, convey a feeling and create awareness, as Mandrup so cleverly does through the Wadden Sea Centre, is a practice that Domani’s artists have also employed in their works for nearly 30 years. It remains at the heart of what we stand for.
