Silkeborg Museum

At the time of the project Silkeborg town museum was housed in a low Neoclassical building organized in long wings around a courtyard. To one side the site is bordered by a busy road several meters above the lawn, to the other by a disused railway line. Utzon rejected Jorn’s idea of rising the building to capture a view, instead he proposed burying most of the extension three stories underground.
As in his own house in Hellebæk, the approach would face a long, single-storey blank wall, which links the building to the main museum and breaks to form a staff entrance.
The foyer, reception, cafe and terrace look out over the existing lawn through a stepped and staggered glass screen, made of V-shaped pre-cast concrete columns which support a grid of shallow, barrel-vaulted rooflights; these run over all the ground floor circulation areas and extend to form a generous entrance canopy.
The main galleries open as a three-storey deep cavern beneath a glazed, ribbed roof whose gently stepped, curving form resembles a horizontal version of the glass walls being designed at the same time for the Sydney Opera House.
The visitor is drawn down by an inviting and intricate ramp system. The glazing bars here, and over the crocus cone galleries, were to be provided with frequent suspension points to enable paintings to be hung from the ceiling; artwork might also hang from the underside of the ramp and suspended floor. The giant crocuses were designed to receive different qualities of natural light and major individual sculptures or paintings could be isolated and displayed there.