Art ark.

Copenhagen's new Museum of Modern Art is located outside the city, in a bleak, rolling landscape surrounded by water. From a distance, the building resembles a shipwreck, yet despite its gestures, it has an intriguing material robustness and spatial complexity.

Breaking away from the traditionally urban locations of modern art galleries, Copenhagen's new Museum of Modern Art occupies a site south of the city at Koge Bay. The windswept, estuarine landscape is punctuated by rolling dunes and the jaunty profiles of small sailing boats. During the late 1980s, a competition was held for the design of the museum, which was won by Soren Robert Lund, a young Danish architect. The new building opened earlier this year. The museum's primary purpose is to collect major works by Danish contemporary artists, but it will also show Scandinavian and foreign art, putting Danish developments into a wider context. Apart from visual art, the museum has a wide ranging cultural remit, that includes film, ballet, theatre, dance and music.

Lund's design is a boldly fashionable Deconstructivist hommage that appears at first sight to have been inspired by Zaha Hadid's iconic fire station at the Vitra complex (AR June 1993). Yet here amid the bleak grassy marshlands, the randomly jagged protrusions of the roof seem curiously appropriate, mimicking the bobbing, angular sails of the boats that ply around the surrounding waterways and the bay. In fact, nautical metaphors abound.(*) The partially dislocated volume of the cafe resembles the ribbed hull of some primeval ship, now eternally suspended in dry dock. Inside the building, the detailing of the conspicuously riveted galvanised steel doors, panels and lift housings prompts comparisons with submarines.

The museum's core element is a cavernous lens-shaped space, 150 m long, that extends through the building. This is the grandiosely titled 'Art Axis', the largest exhibition space in Denmark. The Art Axis forms the spine of the new museum. On the north side of the spine are a series of orthogonal workshop, gallery and storage spaces. On the south side is a svelte, wedge-shaped volume containing an adaptable theatre, media hall, main lobby and museum shop. Crammed into the interstitial space between the spine and the wedge is a trapezoidal sculpture court and the entrance lobby.

The walls of the Art Axis and the wedge are extruded to form a sheltered courtyard that reaches out into the landscape. The massive canted planes protectively funnel visitors towards the entrance at the glazed cleft of the courtyard, marked by a sculptural, oversized gutter. From the entrance you can either descend a broad flight of steps into the bowels of the Art Axis to begin a circuit of the galleries, or you can browse in the toplit lobby containing the museum shop. The dramatic, luminous volume of the cafe is placed at the west side of the museum with views over Koge Bay. It is reached by an elevated, industrial walkway that weaves daringly over the heads of postcard buyers in the lobby and terminates in a flight of stairs that run down the curved wall of the Art Axis.

Once the circuit of galleries has been completed, you can cut back to the lobby and cafe through a narrow corridor located at the end of the Art Axis. The corridor is painted a coruscating carmine and one of its walls shafts through into the gallery space. This raw pigment is the only intrusion of colour (apart from the changing artworks) in an otherwise subdued palette of white, grey and black. The massive white walls of the galleries have a powerful elemental quality, emphasised by the presence of heavy, unadorned materials, predominantly steel and concrete. More overtly, a 36 ton monolith of raw granite strategically positioned in the main lobby provides a geological reminder of ancient, primeval forces.

Since its opening, the museum has proved popular (50 000 visitors in the first three weeks, well on the way to the projected aim of 190 000 visitors for the first year), although perhaps the curiosity value of this strange building in the dunes accounted for this initial enthusiasm. When I visited, it was encouragingly full of Danes solemnly poking around a series of art installations that varied from the perplexing to the bizarre. Like the art it houses, the building has its occasional silly, gestural moments (the zinc clad canopies on angular supports, for instance) but both in conception and execution it embodies an unequivocal Danish commitment to contemporary culture.

* The museum is officially called 'Arken', meaning 'the Ark' in Danish.