Fuglsang Kunstmuseum, Denmark

We have become so used to the gallery embedded in the fabric of the city that to approach a museum deep in the Danish countryside becomes a disconcerting experience. Contemporary art itself, with its installations, its geometric forms and mini-cities, veering between the minimal and the splashes of urban street art, is profoundly a part of the city. But the Fuglsang concentrates on the sweep of Danish art, particularly the romantic Nordic landscape and the sublime; it is a building rooted in the rural and the landscape, both inside and out.

Situated on the island of Lolland, a couple of hours south of Copenhagen, the Fuglsang is a rare and unexpected delight. It was designed by Tony Fretton, who, for more than two decades has been Britain’s finest and most subtly inventive architect. His Lisson Gallery in London was perhaps the city’s most sophisticated urban intervention of the late 20th century, a robust, irregular and almost musically eloquent structure that managed to make sense of a context that embraced concrete towers and Georgian terraces. The context of the Fuglsang could not be more different.

Its setting is defined by a range of agricultural buildings around a 19th-century manor house. The house, an extravagant essay in brick northern gothic, has become, over time, a highly regarded musical venue. Edvard Grieg and Carl Nielsen regularly stayed and played. In a way, the ensemble resembles Snape Maltings, home of the Aldeburgh Festival, a place made by the landscape more than the architecture, a place that forces you to retreat into an oddly intimate relationship with the distant horizon. The new museum expands the site’s cultural role, and, in its art so viscerally connected with the landscape, reinforces the profound sense of place.

The new building sits long and low in the landscape, its land-liner aesthetic enhanced by a series of rooflights emerging almost like funnels and the deck-like profiles of its broad, flat roofs. Entered through a simple glass box foyer, which gives a clear view through the whole depth of this thin building, it is resolutely uncommercial. A simple grey canopy, a steel table-like form, announces the entrance. A stripped and simple coffee shop to one side, a plain counter to the other and you find yourself on the axis that defines the spine of the structure.

The museum is built around a generous corridor. If most architects attempt to avoid the corridor, Fretton has celebrated it, turning it into a long gallery that evokes the cast rooms of academic museums. Off the corridor, a series of small chambers serve to separate out works, providing a more intimate viewing experience. To the other side is a large, minimal single-volume gallery for temporary exhibitions and beyond that a similarly large gallery configured into five rooms using screens.

The corridor terminates in a room-from-which-to-contemplate-the-landscape. A domestically scaled room with large windows (as opposed to a glass box), this is the most remarkable space. So much of the art in the museum focuses on the landscape that it allows your eyes to readjust to the real thing. It put me in mind of the sky-room at New York’s New Museum (by Japanese architects SANAA), an über-urban room in which the city and the sky are brought into the foreground, into the museum. At Fuglsang, too, it is the vast northern sky with its fast-changing canvas of clouds and beams of hopeful sunshine that engrosses you, that imposes the same awed quiet as does New York’s almost geological skyline.

If the galleries are simple, unassuming and quiet, in a Scandinavian sort of way, they belie a depth of detail and subtle interest that make a stroll though the gallery a quiet revelation. The parquet of the floors gently evolves as you move through the building, changing from herringbone to variations on diamond patterns. Up above, the ceilings too contain a grid geometry shifted through 45 degrees. These take inspiration from the unusual floors and ceilings in the elaborate interiors of the old manor, replayed at very low volume in the clean white architecture of the new museum.

Fretton has avoided the two most obvious architectural moves. The first would have been to enclose a courtyard, to create a kind of pseudo-square around which the cultural buildings gather. But this approach would have altered the site’s relationship with the sea and the long horizon – it would have created a more urban condition, and the architect discarded it.

Second, he has refused to open the galleries to the landscape. With the exception of that one vista that forms the culmination of the journey through the spine corridor, the galleries themselves are focused puritanically on the art. The top light is gentle, even and northern; nature is left to shine through the canvases, to emanate from within the art and not allowed to intrude from without. This is a building set thoughtfully and intelligently within a landscape, to which it demurs. But it is not a building that panders to views; its glorious setting must suffice.

Among the most serene works on the walls are those of Vilhelm Hammershøi, many of which are currently on show at the Royal Academy in London. The cool precision of his work, the focus on light and shadow and in particular his haunting studies of a leaden British Museum sit exquisitely in the new gallery. The architecture’s quiet solidity supports the artist’s myriad greys, in which mass and light mingle in tones of a single colour. Painting and building come together to create surprising touches of urbanity in the endlessly green landscape.

Fuglsang means “birdsong” in Danish. The site is apparently a stop along the route for birds migrating towards warmer weather as the Baltic winds begin to bite. This is an architecture that allows the art inside to sing as sweetly as the birds, a deceptively simple, extremely sophisticated new museum by an architect who exhibits a deep and profound sympathy with both the works and the landscape.

www.fuglsangkunstmuseum.dk