Earlier today, the groundbreaking ceremony for Roskilde Festival Folk High School and housing took place. Roskilde Festival Folk High School and housing are at the next stage of development as the project begins its construction.

The Danish folk high school is based on the Danish author and teacher N.F.S.Grundtvig (1872) idea of the folk high school - a school that in many ways differs from normal high schools, for example, the school has no curriculum and no exams, and both students and teachers are living at the school during a course. Further are that folk high schools often focus on creative and humanistic topics and common life at the school.

Roskilde Festival Folk High School is the first newly-established and built folk high school of its kind in Denmark in 45 years, based on the ideals of the Roskilde festival. The ideals and values are very much influenced by the volunteer engagement, the humanistic focus and creative power, that every year forms and characterize the event and the community of Roskilde festival.

The new 3,000m2 high school is a regenerated concrete factory, and accompanying this new centre for art, music, leadership and activism will be the 2,600m2 Roskilde Festival Folk High School student housing, a dynamic environment accommodating the future students of around 150 and teachers of the school.

The concept behind Roskilde Festival Folk High School is to maintain its current industrial shell and renovate it to its original look, whilst adding boxes to its interior to accommodate the classrooms and facilities. The continuous industrial interior is not only maintained but enriched, acting as a collective stage for activities for students. The main idea of this school is that gives room for different activities, organised in three main zones:

The mind - Writing/thinking/debate/leadership

The body - Dance/music

The hand - Visual arts/architecture/design

The boxes include an auditorium for 150 people, a tribune for open discussions, a music studio, workshop, architecture, dance and art classrooms. Materiality reflects the creative identity of the school and the program inside, which over time will be informally developed by the students through graffiti, art, pin-up etc.

The social intentions of the scheme, led by Ragnarock, inspires but also leaves room for further development of outdoor plazas that will breed creativity through a new social, informal platform. The ROCKmagneten masterplan encourages new possibilities for music and creativity by providing an inclusive environment with constant connections between music, education, leisure, performance, indoor and outdoor.

The school is part of the 11,000m2 ROCKmagneten masterplan that will transform the existing cement factories on site into a district for rock music, creativity and youth culture by adding three new buildings, the completed Ragnarock, Roskilde Festival Folk High School, to be completed in Autumn 2018, and the Roskilde Festival Folk High School student housing to be finalized by the end 2017.

The official ceremony to break ground on the construction of the new building was held on Monday 27th March 2017 at 16:00 with speeches by Joy Mogensen, Mayor of Roskilde, Mette Bock, Minister of Culture, Steen Jørgensen, Chairman, Roskilde Festival Charity Society, Christine Antorini, Chairman, Roskilde Festival Højskole, Jesper Nygaard, Director, Realdania, Jacob van Rijs, MVRDV and Dan Stubbegaard, COBE.

MVRDV and COBE continue to work on the next phases of the masterplan and look forward to presenting them in the near future. Roskilde Festival Folk High School is financed with contributions from Realdania, AP Møller Foundation, Knud Højgaard Foundation, Roskilde Gruppen and the City of Roskilde.

Click here to visit the project page.