In my master’s thesis, on the example of the Natural History Museum of Slovenia, I investigate the question of human intervention in the locally important Tivoli, Rožnik and Šiška Hill Landscape Park, where there is complex intertwining of natural and cultural heritage. Theoretical and analytical research proposes a new location in the former Bellevue Hotel area, where construction of the new museum would interfere less with the fundamental functions of the Landscape Park. The museum’s design seeks a balance between the existing roles of the area, while simultaneously, with the relationship of the new intervention to the already present heritage, it raises the question of man’s relationship to natural and cultural heritage. I place the museum in space by seemingly reconstructing the landscape, which becomes a new museum landscape, a public space that exceeds the boundaries of the built environment, and where existing fundamental functions of the Landscape Park intertwine. If placing the museum in the former Bellevue Hotel area looks for balance at first glance, the intervention to the existing hotel building deliberately creates a conflict between the exterior and the interior of the building, thus drawing attention to the irreversibility of human interference with heritage. I am preserving and reconstructing hotel’s exterior walls, which have fallen into disrepair due to human neglect and destruction, while in the interior I am reinterpreting the key features of the former design with a new intervention. The intervention resembles a kind of skeleton that holds up the emptied body of the Bellevue Hotel and deliberately seeks parallels with the museum’s taxidermy.
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