As a culmination of arki_lab’s school project which marks the 50th anniversary of Statens Kunstfond, we hosted the final event at Blågård Skole’s schoolyard last Thursday. The event included an exhibition of the entire workshop process conducted at the school during this fall. This project is a part of event series supported by Statens Kunstfond for the occasion of their 50th anniversary. All supported projects had the purpose of representing various art forms in Denmark and arki_lab had the honor to represent the field of architecture.
Our project at Blågård Skole involved two modules of workshops – The Local Urban Space and Schoolyard as an Urban Space, that were implemented with participants from 7th and 8th grade. The overall aim of each module was to provide an opportunity for young students to learn about urban space and, more specifically, to be engaged with urban design as a democratic process though a user-driven approach.
The final event exhibited the documentation of this entire process together with prototypes and collages that were created by students as actual products of urban analysis conducted with them. This material illustrates their ideas on how to transform the schoolyard as an urban space while taking into account multiple sets of users. Moreover, we utilized this event as a chance for students to directly share this new experience and their ideas – as facilitators in short urban walks with the visitors. In this way, we wanted to further engage the students with the broader community and to also involve a set of significant urban actors in the process.
Besides the exhibition and facilitative role of the participants, event’s program included talks by prominent guests, such as Christina Stenius (Department and Deputy Manager at Blågård Skole), Kim Herford Nielsen (President of the Statens Kunstfond scholarships and project support committee for Architecture) and Pia Allerslev (Child and Youth Mayor of Copenhagen). They all welcomed arki_lab’s efforts to establish civic engagement as an essential aspect of urban design and planning in Copenhagen. In addition, Pia Allerslev expressed her enthusiasm about arki_lab’s schoolyard project after seeing the exhibition, when she said: “As the Child and Youth Mayor, I think that this is an incredibly exciting project – and it is precisely the expression of some of the new possibilities and different learning pathways we want the school to open up to. It’s about architecture – it’s about the urban environment – it’s about children and young people’s everyday lives here in Nørrebro. In the school yard. It’s about what we call public space – with room for everyone.” Furthermore, a student representative from Blågård Skole has provided everyone with a great insight in students’ learning process, which she described in the following words: “We have learned what we can use our urban spaces for, and how much we are important for the development of our urban space.”
See more from our workshops at Blågård Skole:
http://vimeo.com/arkilab/videos
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