Description

The Roskilde Festival has been held annually in Roskilde near Copenhagen since 1971. In recent years, the foundations for the new, culturally dominated Musicon district have been laid. The city acquired the site in 2013 after the concrete producer Unicon had relocated its production.

A neighborhood with around 2000 flats and just as many jobs is to be built here. The core of Musicon is an ensemble of cultural facilities, including the Ragnarock Museum (2016) and the Roskilde Festival Højskole, both planned jointly by COBE from Copenhagen and MVRDV from Rotterdam. Dormitories and the first apartment buildings have also been completed – largely without damaging the fragile industrial charm.

The factory building next to the museum became the site of the Roskilde Festival Højskole. Danish Højskole are focused on career orientation for school leavers; the young people live on site for a semester and can get a taste of different disciplines to explore their own inclination.  The school in Roskilde is the first new building of a højskole in fifty years.

COBE and MVRDV, who divided the work between planning groups in Copenhagen and Rotterdam, hardly changed the volume and proportions of the existing modular building. Two minimally pitched gable roofs span between four rows of columns, and all structural elements are prefabricated concrete elements. In the heated units, the planners had to retrofit the façade with insulation which is hidden in a double-skin concrete wall. The roof construction is covered on the inside with grey wood wool lightweight panel for soundproofing reasons and pierced by skylights for daylighting. Underneath, the architects have grouped 16 coloured boxes which accommodate spaces for the teaching of music, media, management, politics, arts and crafts, as well as a staff room, secretary’s office and sanitary facilities. The boxes are stacked two storeys high, with the spaces in between wafting around and through them. Across the floors, the internal open space connects the front areas and the interior of the boxes through large windows, some of which can be opened.

In the school building the day begins in the orange box to the left of the entrance. Here, orange chairs stand on orange steps – orange, like the famous “Orange Stage” at the festival, where Bob Dylan, for example, has performed many times. This orange box dominates the lobby as an auditorium, into which it can also be extended. The wooden staircase there is used for chatting, reading or as a grandstand for events.

The rooms in the school are attractively designed with simple means, such as colour and material, spatial proportions and internal references. The staff room, for example, is the only wooden-clad volume, the dance box is painted yellow and the elegant recording studio on the upper floor is polished black. In the dining room there is lounge furniture was cobbled together from old festival structures.

The students live in shared apartments with two-bed rooms in the neighbouring dormitory and there is also a row of terraced houses for the teachers. The façades are clad with variously corrugated and nuanced grey corrugated sheets, giving the impression of container architecture, which would have been too cost-intensive in its original form. The connecting, open access levels are intended to serve as balconies of encounter.

Originally published in Bauwelt 17.2019, pp. 40-45, abridged and edited for Building Types online, translated by Julian Reisenberger

 

---