Visions of the future. Practical and spatial solution proposals for Faaborg Museum – by students of the Aarhus School of Architecture

In autumn 2022, students from Aarhus School of Architecture used Faaborg Museum as a study object in their course of study. First, the students were given the task of working in depth with Carl Petersen’s building through surveys and descriptions. They then continued to work on various issues that Faaborg Museum presented to them.

Faaborg Museum was established in these rooms in 1910 at the initiative of canning manufacturer Mads Rasmussen. The aim was to create a collection of the art of the Funen painters that was open to the public. A few years after the museum was inaugurated, Mads Rasmussen started the construction of a completely new building for the museum. A young, relatively untried architect, Carl Petersen, was given the task and he created the beautiful Faaborg Museum on a plot of land that lay right next to Mads Rasmussen’s former canning factory.

The museum became more than just a beautiful setting for the art of the Funen painters and has since gained special status as a pioneering work of architecture within the period’s neoclassicism. In the more than one hundred years that have passed since the museum was built, demands and audience wishes for museums have changed significantly, and today the museum faces a number of challenges in order to continue to be able to deliver the services that a modern audience expects. It is these issues that form the basis of the second part of the student work. Some of the issues that are addressed are, among other things, better visitor facilities, better conditions of access at the museum entrance, better facilities for arranging events and lectures, more flexible and improved facilities for a museum café, increased and climate regulated exhibition space both for special exhibitions, and for displaying the museum’s collection of ceramics by Carl Petersen and the museum’s delicate works on paper.

It must be emphasized that everything in the exhibition is part of a course of study, and even though real issues are addressed, the students’ assignments are only study work and visions, and not actual proposals or plans.