Terraced school gives room for movement

A brand new school in Copenhagen's new Sluseholmen district is ready to welcome children. The special location between city and nature, water and traffic is solved with a welcoming architecture that adapts to both urban and human requirements.

Despite the typical challenges faced by city schools, the school's structure is conceived as part of a larger landscape, where the building itself provides green spaces for both learning and play. The school's highest point faces onto a large road, where an indoor car park with a sports hall on top forms a noise-insulating ridge. From here, the school terraces down towards the entrance, where each floor differentiates school years and activities, while remaining connected by a movement system that links the indoors and outdoors at all levels. The facades are very simple, clad with vertical wooden strips and window sections stretched between the floor markings in horizontal steel cladding.

Architectural school environment

The entrance level features several open squares that can also be used for other events in the district. From here, you move up the building and are met by daylight from several directions, as the school has three atriums that help to structure the individual floors. The overall concept of the building, with its vertical and horizontal dynamic, is also a component of its interior expression.

All ceilings are clad in natural-coloured Troldtekt in a completely new longitudinal profile system that was specially developed for Sluseholmen School. The profile system is practical in that it provides access to underlying installations, while at the same time the ceiling surfaces appear very calm, with a direction parallel to the movement of the building. Ceiling profiles in the school's classrooms point towards the facade. The galvanised steel strips are slightly recessed and give the ceiling tile a softened look.

While the lines of the ceilings emphasise the building's various horizontal layers, the interior wooden strips are perceived as vertical lines that also create a robust and welcoming expression inside.