Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art was designed by the Danish architects Jorgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert and opened in 1958 in Humlebaek, north of Copenhagen, on a wooded coastal estate whose nineteenth century owner, having had three successive wives all named Louise, gave the property the name Louisiana that the museum still carries. The founder, Knud W. Jensen, asked the architects to design a series of low, glass-walled pavilions that would follow the site's existing topography and mature trees rather than a single monumental building, an approach that let the museum expand gradually in stages over subsequent decades as new wings were added around its original nineteenth century villa. Long glazed corridors connect the galleries to one another and to an extensive outdoor sculpture park running down to the Oresund strait, blurring the boundary between the museum's interior exhibition spaces and its landscaped grounds. The result became widely influential on later museum architecture for demonstrating that a modern art museum could be organized as a low, dispersed sequence of intimate rooms rather than a single grand structure. The museum's name and subject are unrelated to the Museum of Modern Art in New York or to the American state of Louisiana, sharing only a coincidental name drawn from the original estate's former owners.