A Qualified Utopia: The Work of Jørgen Bo and Vilhelm Wohlert at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

This dissertation examines the work of the Danish architects Jørgen Bo (1919–99) and Vilhelm Wohlert (1920–2007) at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, located on an old estate, in Humlebæk, Denmark. During 1956–1991, the two architects completed six buildings that extend a nineteenth-century villa and create a continuous circuit around the museum park. The formal variations between those buildings have inhibited investigation and resulted in a major gap in the knowledge of modern Danish architecture. The missing link is the role of Knud W. Jensen (1916–2000), Louisiana’s founder and director until 1991, whose instructions to the architects led to the variations between the buildings.

The research supporting this study was conducted in two stages: documentation and analysis. In the first stage, primary source-material, most of it previously unexamined, was assembled to create a comprehensive record of Louisiana’s design and construction. In the second stage, the museum’s origins and expansion were examined within a series of historical contexts that shed light on Bo and Wohlert’s work, as well as Jensen’s evolving vision for Louisiana. By combining these stages of research, it is evident that Bo and Wohlert employed a handful of fundamental principles throughout their work, even as Jensen’s requirements varied from building to building. As such, we can regard the totality of Bo and Wohlert’s work as a single building that was designed in a contingent manner and constructed over a period of thirty-five years.

Examining that unitary building through Jensen’s concept of a “qualified utopia,” it is evident that Bo and Wohlert’s architecture embodied and preserved Jensen’s program of unifying art and everyday experience, by adapting modernist models of exhibition space to Louisiana’s landscape. More broadly, the theorem of a Qualified Utopia identifies an essential characteristic of modern Nordic architecture and locates Louisiana within that subculture. As a result, it is possible to recognize a regional tradition that transcended stylistic distinctions and provides the foundation for future scholarship.