KEA Charrette 2017

THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL

How do you get 70 international students to develop an unknown site in an unfamiliar area of Copenhagen? The 2017 Charrette was lucky enough to work with a local Nordvest based organisation called Vibe&Tone. Vibe&Tone is a young company whose love and knowledge of the Nordvest neighborhood and all its potential infused the students with the tools to create concepts rooted in the local community. 

The framework for the workshop was delivered by the KEA: 

“The students were tasked with designing solutions for 4 specific sites around the city of Copenhagen focusing on how design can help citizens become more involved in their surroundings and how citizens can be prompted to engage more with their own individual health in collaboration with the surrounding city and other actors within that city space.”
- Rasmus Simonsen: Lecturer at KEA and part of the Charrette planning group.  

TOO MUCH OR TOO LITTLE

The students worked their transformative design sensibilities on four very different sites in the Nordvest neighborhood: 

Nørrebro Station is the epicenter of transport and human activity in NV. It is filled with people of all ages and nationalities, buses, trains, cars, bikes, building projects, homeless people, impromptu street markets, and much, much more. The bustle and hustle is so intense that it overwhelms you, but it also contains an unmatchable energy and it is indeed the soul of NV in a few square meters. The challenge for the Charrette students was to make this space inviting for inhabitants to move around in. 

Grønningen Park is empty. A large green area surrounded by apartment buildings, day care institutions and a school – yet nobody uses the park. It is nature in the city, but the students needed to figure out how to instill some culture into this empty square. 

Bispebjerg School is a beautiful old building full of cultural significance, but empty and unused by the NV residents. Old beautiful school buildings do not traditionally open out towards the surrounding areas and invite people in, but are instead closed and dark. The task was to inject nature into this great old building to make it green and inviting. 

The ISS/Calum lot is huge, but barren and desolate. The space is filled with potential and the promise of activity, but also difficult to develop because it needs a comprehensive plan to become a place people want to use. The challenge for the Charrette students was clearly to give it some of that NV soul. 

NETWORKING, HARD WORK AND FUN

After a week filled with late nights and hard work the students presented their projects to a packed crowd on KEAs Main Campus. In the crowd was also a jury consisting of local and international designers, architects and urban planners to evaluate each concept and give feedback to the groups. 

"The best groups managed to blend concepts from architecture with concepts from communication design, game design, and digital solutions to build quite unique concepts that managed to put the user in the centre of design in a very collaborative way” 
- Rasmus Simonsen: Lecturer at KEA and part of the Charrette planning group. 

After a lot of discussion in the jury, group 7 was crowned “best project” by the jury while group 5 won the coveted “people’s choice” award. In the end the most important result however was seeing the amazing concepts that sprung from just a few days work and how the students enjoyed the experience. When asking the students the takeaway seems obvious: 

“It’s been great. I’m really happy to work with different people from different fields, not just architects and not just graphic designers, but they are really different people and that makes the work really interesting and totally different. We can learn a lot from each other”
- Elena, KEA 

“It’s been a lot of hard work and a lot of long days, but in the end I think it pays off. You have a lot of fun and you meet new people. Overall it is a great experience.”
- Josh, Fontys University

“We are so diverse. We have architecture students, design students and every one of us has learned so much from each other.”
- Francesca, London South Bank  

Get inspired and see all the group projects in the menu.