Water world

The second installment in Dorte Mandrup's Wadden Sea trilogy, this Dutch visitor centre and scientific hub draws inspiration from the endless cycle of the tide

- ALISA LARSEN

Dorte Mandrup's Wadden Sea World Heritage Centre, the Danish architect's second work within the Unesco-protected region, connects landscape, science and emotion in a spiral of movement on the Netherlands' northern shores.

It's located in Lauwersoog, a little-known coastal community, just north of Groningen, with a palpable sense of rhythm. Between the brackish calm of the man-made Lauwersmeer lake and the tidal expanse of the Wadden Sea, the Dutch harbour village sits where land, water and sky blur into one another.

The recently completed project consists of a sculptural timber spiral rising from the water surface. Both building and landscape, it is a place of movement, observation and return, and forms part of a family of structures, including the Wadden Sea Centre in Ribe, Denmark (completed in 2017), and the soon-to-be-finished Wadden Sea World Heritage Visitor Centre in Wilhelmshaven, Germany. Together, they form a trilogy exploring humankind's fragile relationship with this immense intertidal world – the largest of its kind on the planet, stretching across the coasts of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.

'It's fascinating,' says Mandrup. 'The Wadden Sea is one continuous system, yet it changes as you move from Denmark to Germany and the Netherlands. The landscape looks the same from above, but what lies beneath it – culturally, historically, emotionally – is always different.' If the origami-like Ribe centre folds the flat Danish landscape upward, Lauwersoog brings the idea of a spiral or a twist, inspired by the rhythm of the tides and the turning of the harbour.