Expectations and Surprises is the firm’s entry to the House of Fairytales open ideas competition launched and organized by the Odense City Museums and the City of Odense in Denmark in September 2013. The brief called for a new House of Fairytales and a garden with a strong focus on the stories of Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen.
The design is about two cubes – the candy house and the earth house. The interior of the candy house employs pitch black walls and ceiling and an infinity mirror flooring to give the impression of nothingness. On the other hand, the simple earth house reveals layers of earth, trees, and sky inside. Also in this simplercube surprisingly the House of Fairytales is where the access to the galleries can be found. Further into it is a ramp that leads to Andersen’s house capping off the museum experience.
Expectations and Surprises is a narrative of the two simple cubes with similar dimensions but of contrasting facade and interiors is an experimentation of expressing humanistic values. It underlines the simplicity and profoundness of Andersen’s work by how the simplest of things could define the most complex context.
