Olafur Eliasson’s first building is as trippy as you’d expect

Olafur Eliasson is a man of many interests. Throughout his decades-spanning career, the Icelandic-Danish artist has done everything from installing perception-bending artworks at Versailles to designing lamps for the developing world. His work often straddles the line between artistic spatial experiment and architecture, so it makes sense that his next project is a full-scale building.

Anders Sune Berg

Working with his longtime collaborator Sebastian Behmann, the architecture branch of Eliasson’s studio, called Studio Other Spaces, recently finished its first building in Vejle, Denmark, for the company Kirk Kapital. The curving brick building, called Fjordenhus, rises from the harbor and connects to land via a walkway.

Anders Sune Berg

According to Eliasson, Fjordenhus is meant to be more than a stationary building. Like much of his artwork, Fjordenhus is an exploration of shape and perception, with platforms that arch out over the water and rooms that are specifically designed to house his installations.

Anders Sune Berg

He writes:

This allowed us to turn years of research—on perception, physical movement, light, nature, and the experience of space—into a building that is at once a total work of art and a fully functional architectural structure. In the design team, we experimented from early on with how to create an organic building that would respond to the ebb and flow of the tides, to the shimmering surface of the water, changing at different times of the day and of the year.

Mission accomplished.

Anders Sune Berg

Anders Sune Berg

Anders Sune Berg

Via: Designboom