The Viking Ship Hall: A Political History

In 2016, after several winter storms had battered and damaged the building, the rightwing populist Danish People’s Party offered to spend €15m of the national budget on finally demolishing Erik Christian Sørensen’s celebrated Viking Ship Hall in Roskilde, and replace it with a new building in iconic Viking style.

Two years later, after much public throat-stabbing and finetuned negotiations behind the scene, it was finally delisted. Presently it still stands, if only on borrowed time, its future being essentially unknown.

Hailed as a uniquely slender and light example of Scandinavian brutalism, it was an experimental structure which fared poorly from neglected upkeep and extreme weather events.

Research into its history reveals that this piece of modernist architectural heritage is not merely an object of political negotiations and decisions. A proper political history of the building demands that its own capacity to affect its destiny is properly taken into account, if only as one political factor among others.