A visit to the Ilulissat Icefjord is an overwhelming experience, an encounter with an immense natural phenomenon that changes our perspective on the relationships between nature, humanity, and the climate. The tremendous scale of the fjord is not easy to reconcile with our usual concepts of space and nature. While the fjord can only be experienced from a distance, the proposed Ilulissat visitors centre helps make the experience comprehensible to visitors by offering them a scale for contemplating what they have seen.
Rather than concentrate all functions of a visitor centre into an isolated, single building within the landscape, Olafur Eliasson and Studio Other Spaces proposed centre inhabits the landscape in the form of a park. The various programmes of the Icefjord Park are distributed throughout the terrain, anchored in two distinctive buildings, and connected by a 360-degree path. The Circle Walk emphasises an open, inclusive understanding of nature and our place within it. Instead of leading to a single destination, the path inspires visitors to actively engage with the landscape by moving across an area otherwise left unexplored.
Competiong teams: Dorte Mandrup, Kengo Kuma, Snøhetta, Studio Other Spaces withOlafur Eliasson
