Aarhus Architecture School is a proposal for a new type of urban campus which harnesses unexpected meetings and situations in order to create an extraordinarily creative environment. The buildings have been designed so that every square meter becomes a potential site for interaction, discussion and the shaping of new ideas. Traditional circulation has been replaced by halls and streets that embody both new spatial and social potentials. This produces a new type of interdependency between spaces, where rooms connect to each other through the interaction of architectural elements…
Aarhus Architecture School is a proposal for a new type of urban campus which harnesses unexpected meetings and situations in order to create an extraordinarily creative environment. The buildings have been designed so that every square meter becomes a potential site for interaction, discussion and the shaping of new ideas. Traditional circulation has been replaced by halls and streets that embody both new spatial and social potentials. This produces a new type of interdependency between spaces, where rooms connect to each other through the interaction of architectural elements.
The school is designed to accommodate the constantly changing everyday life of the architecture student, to whom the workplace is a space of unpredictable nature. The constant moving from task-to-task becomes a balancing act between collective and individual work. It reveals to us how creativity is in fact first and foremost the outcome of collective efforts. In a time when individuality seems to triumph over shared values, the new school of architecture offers a rare opportunity to invest in the collective dimension for the architectural education and the city that surrounds it. An architecture school, just like any educational environment, is a creative place, and creativity grows out of the unexpected. A truly good school or university should not only bring people together, but push students to interact in new and unforeseen ways.
The building is composed of a system of basic architectural elements organised to define rooms that vary in scale and join together to provide both collective and individual spaces. They are abstract enough to be negotiated and adapted within different conditions of use. The structure addresses space in its most essential manner by giving rhythm and proportion to the plan, leaving the divisions between spaces to be flexible and adapted by the users. Through the making of these limits, the project aims to interpret and critically address the relationship between city and building, structure and space, individual and collective.
