Elisabet Sundin Architecture

Before Christmas in 2018 we teamed up with architects Anders Grivi Norman and Sascha Jung from SWECO and designed a competition entry for a very large 37 000 m2 campus, mixing 12 different artisan fields of education. In addition to the different workshops and education rooms, the facility should also include a sports hall, canteen, reception, teacher rooms, seminar rooms and a large student residency.

Because of the somewhat inflexible height restrictions, we decided fairly early that we wanted to keep all of the functions under the same roof; i.e. one continuous building.

One substantial design idea was a contiguous access road around the building to keep the heavy vehicles on the outside, leaving the area on the inside as a big meadow surrounded by an internal colonnade providing the students full access to the different parts of the building. With this, and the building’s horse-shoe-shape, we tried to give all the different fields of study one access from the outside parking/road and one access from the inside meadow.

The main access for visitors and first-time arrivals would be from the big road with bicycle or public transport. Arriving through a big open inner 

courtyard to be met by an intersecting double height space with reception and café area and a complete glass wall opening up to the big inner courtyard. This would give you a good overview of the building before heading for your destination.

Placing the student housing on the top in a rigid grid with their own internal courtyards, would provide them the right calm atmosphere and at the same time easy access to all facilities. In each end of the two wings one would find the canteen and the sports hall.

The competition did not allow renderings or illustrations of any sort, only sketches. We therefore experimented with some line drawings, to give an idea of the breathtaking spaces we imagined.