Louisiana
Louisiana is an art museum that winds through a park by the Øresund. Glass corridors link an old villa with low, whitewashed pavilions. The architecture is so discreet that the landscape and the art take the leading role.
Knud W. Jensen, a cheese wholesaler and art collector, bought a 19th-century villa in Humlebæk north of Copenhagen in 1954. The estate was called Louisiana after the first owner’s three wives, who were all called Louise. Jensen engaged the young architects Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert, and the museum opened in 1958. It has since been extended in several stages.
The architects placed new pavilions in the park, linked by glass corridors that wind between the trees. The buildings are low, with whitewashed brick, timber and large areas of glass. They are inspired by Japanese architecture and by American houses from the West Coast. Visitors move between art and nature, and the view of the sea keeps returning. The sculpture park facing the Øresund has works by Henry Moore and Alexander Calder among others.
Louisiana has become one of the most visited art museums in the Nordic countries and a model for museums that combine art, architecture and landscape. It shows Danish modernism’s way of working with simple materials and a human scale. The architecture has been called an example of how a building can step back to make room for what it shows.