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‘Smaating’: a museum for Hans Christian Andersen, ‘House of Fairytales’ Competition

Little Worlds

‘Smaating’, which means ‘little, unimportant things’, is the Danish word that H.C.Andersen used in order to describe his own fairytales [1].  He believed that his plays, poems and novels were more important than his little stories, which he considered mere trifles, bagatelles. At the same time it is today widely recognised that in his stories he found a way to deal with important, universal, even philosophical issues in a playful manner, using humour, irony, allegory, passing through important themes, and at the same time referring to serious, even grave notions -death or redemption- like a playful walk in the forest.

In our proposal we focus on the notion of ‘Smaating’, ‘little things’, not as the lack of importance, but on the contrary, as the creation of small worlds, miniature worlds, each one of which produces its own playful and self-sustained universe. The Italian author Umberto Eco uses the term ‘small world’ to describe the effect that fiction has on the reader; the writer in the story creates the frame that temporarily differentiates the reader from the rest of the world and within it the writer creates a new world part of which is the reader, a miniature world where everything makes a sense, even the most irrational things.

Like in Eco’s idea of ‘small worlds’, we propose the creation of small ‘narrative worlds’, which act as time and space frames within which visitors, like the readers of a story, will have the opportunity to experience the creation of a fictional world in reference to a number of recurrent themes.

We have resulted in a list of themes that we consider to be recurrent in Andersen’s work, as they appear in similar forms at parts of his work, like for example ‘the grotesque’, ‘nature’, ‘weather’, ‘water’ etc. The themes correspond to specific spaces, which we provide with a specific title: ‘Huge’,  ‘The Glorious Sea’, The Fragrant Forest’. etc. In each space the themes unfold through techniques that trigger experiences, like performances, workshops, exhibitions or playful processes. In this way the spaces of the “House of Fairytales” become universal, as they refer to stories but at the same time they refer to universal qualities, through which children can learn about the world and adults can reflect upon the world.

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PROJECT: ‘Smaating, Little Worlds’ participation at the ‘House of Fairytales’ competition for a museum for Hans Christian Andersen

CLIENT: Odense City Museums

PLACE/TIME: Odense, Denmark, 2013

DESIGN TEAM: Christiana Ioannou, Christos Papastergiou, Christiana Pitsillidou

project published at competition website: here

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PLAN

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DIAGRAM OF STORIES, RECURRENT THEMES & THEMATIC SPACES INTERRELATION

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‘THE DRESSING ROOM’

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‘THE FRAGRANT FOREST’

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‘HUGE’

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‘THE SHADOW’ & ‘LEAP AND DANCE’

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‘THE GLORIOUS SEA’

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‘THE CRYSTAL’

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MODEL IMAGES #1

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MODEL IMAGES #2

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