The thesis aims to design a museum for exhibiting the acts considered as the Heavy Water Actions, in Norway, during the Second World War.
The program for the museum is created loosely on the competition brief for the Danish “Frihedsmuseet” which has been a closed competition running in the spring of 2015 for a new museum for the Danish resistance movement.
From here, I have created a building programme, which better fits the needs and complications met when building in the situational context of the site in Telemark.
The location of the museum will be on the mountainous coast of the Tinnsjø, where it will utilize the advantages of the terrain as much as possible to create an intriguing experience for the users.
For the users to be able to get in depth with the story the exhibition will follow a chronological telling of the missions undertaken; the story will be broken up in descriptive parts, each representing a part of the exhibition. To further enhance the immersion into the telling, by the users, the exhibition of the different parts of the story will be accompanied by settings, creating an atmosphere close to the experience of the original participants.
The main focus of setting the atmosphere of the exhibition rooms will be working with the accessible daylight. Through experimentations, digital and in models, each part of the exhibition will be shaped to provide the conditions for the desired experience of the exhibitions as stated within the room programme designed and written for the museum on this site.
Besides having to control the alteration of the daylight, the structural part of the museum must also be proven to keep its structural integrity under the loads and forces affecting the constructions. These will be studied and determined to create the basis on which the design of the lighting is created.
By combining the understanding of structural integrity with knowledge of the light design, the goal is to improve not only the construction of the buildings but also the experience of the room aesthetics.
For this project, the main concerns within the integration of these parameters into the design process are to be found in the museum’s location on a mountain. To solve the designs accordingly, they must conform to the site where direct sunlight must be prevented in the exhibitions while still using the natural light to create atmospheres that portray those experiences the guests are to receive within the exhibitions. Complicating this is the mountain’s own shadowing of the site that prevents daylight.
The hillside of the mountain also prevents a flat layout, for ease of movement, of the museum without digging into the mountain. This will change the parameters of the loads acting upon the construction, which again may have an impact on the how the rooms are perceived.