H.C. Andersen’s Garden by MASU Planning

H.C. Andersen’s Garden is a sensory oasis in Odense – the birthplace of the beloved storyteller and Denmark’s third-largest city. The garden simultaneously functions as a museum garden, an urban space, and a recreational city park.

The garden’s playful character appeals equally to children and adults, beautifully enhancing the experience of the H.C. Andersen House, while also standing out as a landscape. Nestled in the heart of Odense, the garden is an essential part of the major transformation the city centre has undergone in recent years.

H.C. Andersen’s Garden reinterprets the materiality of the city: familiar elements such as granite cobblestones, gravel paths, and trimmed hedges create a seamless connection to the surrounding urban environment. Yet, five entrances draw visitors into an entirely different world – a magical and adventurous garden where they are encouraged to take a stroll, explore, or just pause and enjoy the garden’s unique atmosphere. Hence, the garden offers visitors a vivid sensory experience and a welcome pause from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

Buildings and landscape are Interwoven

In Andersen’s fairy tales opposites constantly coexist and there is an equal relationship between humanity, nature, and the surrounding world.

Based on this ethos, the design of H.C. Andersen’s House and Garden has a strong interplay between building and landscape. The edges between surrounding city, park and museum are blurred and reflect the transition between physical world and the imaginary world in Andersen’s stories

Two-thirds of the museum is located underground to preserve as much green urban space as possible. The remaining third appears as light, wooden pavilions, naturally integrated into the garden and its narrative.

Much of the urban garden is built on elevated decks, seamlessly weaving the building and garden together to a unified whole. Boundaries between indoors and outdoors, built and grown, above and below, reality and fantasy are blurred – creating an enchanting sequence of spaces that reflect the complex and ambiguous world of Andersen’s stories, where reality and fantasy is blurred.

The Garden reflect the inherent themes of HCA’s Stories

H.C. Andersen’s Garden is subdivided into a several smaller gardens representing different atmospheres of his fairytales, while also reflecting how H. C. Andersen perceived nature as a source of inspiration.

The Giants’ Garden reflects the feeling of being small and wandering among big plants, just like Thumbelina; in The Mirror Pool visitors can look into the deep waters of the longing mermaid; The Dark Garden symbolizes the dark and twisted nature themes of his stories, and The Light Garden creates and playful and light atmosphere, where the variety of flowers, grasses, and trees forms a habitat for different birds, insects, and butterflies gracing the garden in summer.

Hedges frame the visit

Hedges are a classic garden element and represent something familiar and ordinary and establishes clear spatial boundaries. In H.C. Andersen’s Garden hedges are used metaphorically – as a dividing element, a frame, and a as mean of uniting building and landscape. Here hedges are exaggerated, deformed, stretched, and transformed hedges reflects the complexity and richness of H.C. Andersen’s world. They create enclosures, openings, and spatial sequences, orchestrating a series of unique sensory experiences and viewpoints that invites visitors on a journey of exploration.

As an integral part of the project, solutions have been implemented to meet the challenges posed by increasingly frequent heavy rain events caused by climate change.

Awards and acknowledgements

H.C. Andersen’s Garden is the winner of the latest edition of The Danish Landscape Award – a biennial award that aims to honour Danish landscape architecture projects that serve as an inspiration for the development of the landscape industry. The Danish Landscape Award is presented by The Association of Danish Landscape Architects, Park- og Naturforvalterne and the Danish Association of Architectural Firms. The award sparked significant international attention, with coverage in leading websites and magazines.

In 2023 H.C. Andersen’s House and Garden received The City of Odense’s Architectural Prize for best new building.

Most recently, H.C. Andersen’s Garden was highlighted as an example of a “green shortcut” and a place offering moments of calm in everyday life, in the white paper presented by an expert architectural panel to the Danish Minister for Culture, as part of the development of a new national architectural policy.

• All landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape:
MASU Planning

• All architecture offices involved in the design:
Kengo Kuma Architects Associated (Main architectural advisor), Cornelius+Vöge Arkitekter, and C&W Arkitekter.

• Other credits:
Søren Jensen Engineers, Jesper Kongshaug (Lighting Design), OK Nygaard (Contractor). Municipality of Odense (Client with a donation from The A.P. Møller Foundation)

Photographs by Rasmus Hjortshøj.

more by MASU Planning

The new H.C. Andersen Fairy-tale Garden