Authors: Pernille Helledie Isaksen and Vibeke Grupe (Danish Association of Architectural Firms). Translated by Dan A. Marmorstein. Danish Association of Architectural Firms (Danske Ark) is a trade association with approx. 700 member firms, equivalent to 95% of all Danish architectural firms. The organization represents the interests of architectural practices in Denmark and works towards promoting the architectural profession, providing support and resources to member firms, advocating for relevant policies, and fostering collaboration within the industry. Danske Ark has been involved in the Desire project as an expert organisation.
What transpires when students from a Danish eighth-grade class [13-15 years old] from the neighborhood school come to be seriously involved in the development of a new park, which is slated to play a part in revamping the Danish susceptible residential area, Gadehavegård, located in the city of Høje Taastrup?
Quite a bit, if you ask the two architectural design studios, GXN (GXN Innovation) and SLA (SLA), both of which played a role in developing the project’s program.
One of the actors here, Nabil Zacharias Ben Chaabane, who is project manager at SLA, even goes so far as to say:
“This is some of the best user-involvement I have witnessed in my 15 years as an urban planner. The students were taken seriously. Over a course of two weeks, they were instructed by leading experts in the field, and they were active in turning their ideas into concrete sketches and 3D models, which they eventually presented to parents, to representatives from Domea and to the city's mayor. This is an experience that children in neighborhoods like Gadehavegård seldom have any access to.”
The work with involving the youngsters from Gadehavegård in the development of a new park and new recrational areas in the residential quarter is one facet of Desire – one of the European Commission's six New European Bauhaus lighthouse demonstrators.
Since 2022, four Danish architectural design studios have been involved in three Danish Desire projects, which have the programmatic objective of ‘developing concrete proposals for how art, architecture and co-creation can contribute to bringing forth irresistible circular societies.
GXN: Imagine if more competitions contained knowledge about the users
One thing is the experience and sensation of being listened to, as user of a place. This in itself is valuable. Especially for youngsters who may not be accustomed to having their voices heard when it has to do with their local area. Something else again is the value that user involvement also confers upon the building owner and contributes to the final project. This is how Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard, who is partner and head of innovation at GXN, puts it:
“The young people are placing particular emphasis on favorable places in the park where people can gather together with their families. But also spots where one can slip away and just be by her/himself. And the young people were also pointing toward the vital importance of a number of basic things, like access to toilets, running water, and places where they could re-charge their cell phones. On the background of the input and ideas, we have subsequently developed a number of design principles, which will now become part of Domea.dk’s tender documents at the time that the new park is going to be designed and laid out. Domea.dk is a leading public administration and consultancy company, supporting housing organizations and administrations that together own and manage just over 80,000 homes distributed throughout the country (About us - Domea.dk).
Domea.dk is working on programming transformation of Gadehavegåard, and the tender documents for this project will come to contain an ‘inspiration catalogue’ containing all of the young people's ideas. And we’ve collected the positive input from, among others, SLA and Agora; this input has also played a part in ensuring a super-process, with a high level of knowledge. The upshot of all this is that Domea.dk is now standing in a strong position with a piece of painstaking and thorough preparatory work, which can contribute to their having a park developed in Gadehavegård that will answer some specific needs which have been described by the end users,” adds Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard.
He also regards the enhanced user involvement during the early phases as being of great value to the architect: “And to think, if you, as a bidding architect – who, in a classic competition, typically has but a few weeks to come up with the very best solution, and with a very small modicum of knowledge available – were suddenly to be presented with competition material that contains qualified knowledge about the users of the place. Knowledge on the basis of which one could build up her/his ideas and designs? This is – as viewed from my chair – of enormous value,” says Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard.
As a partner in GXN, which functions as an independent research- and innovation-company alongside 3XN (3XN Architects), Kåre Stokholm Poulsgaard is increasingly experiencing an enhanced appetite on the part of building owners to move away from business as usual and to make greater use of the earlier phases, in order to ensure that the choices that are being made will also generate value in the long run and answer the needs and wishes that the end user has.
“When you understand the people whom you are designing for, you become a better architect. However, the way in which architectural competitions typically function these days does not really offer any opportunity to make inquiries of the people who are actually going to be using the building or neighborhood in question. So, how do you build up a reservoir of knowledge about the people for whom you are going to design? What this requires is that you, as architect, challenge the prevailing frames and that we become better at pointing out the value that doing so gives to the building owner and to the final project when the users are engaged and involved from the get-go.”
SLA: We’ve got to do things like to an interior designer would
For SLA, the involvement in the Desire project in Gadehavegård has resulted in several important experiences. For the nature-based design studio, the tenor of the task was to analyze – working together with the local 8th class students – the nature that is present in Gadehavegård, to ensure that the end product will stimulate greater biodiversity.
“It is of great importance for the final result when you lead off with a mapping of the area – including the user's perspective – before putting pen to paper on the final project. An interior designer that has been assigned the task of furnishing a new office building doesn’t get started, just like that, either. Such a designer poses a whole lot of questions to the users and makes a lot of observations, here and there, about how the building functions and how it is used, before getting started with arranging the space. This is a practice that we would actually like to take along with us, out into the countryside. It mustn’t stop at the building’s wall.” This is how Nabil Zacharias Ben Chaabane, urban planner in SLA, puts it.
Chaabane points to another important realization that has supervened after having spent two years with Desire:
“The architect can’t solve everything. On the other hand, the architect ought to take responsibility for enlisting aid from other relevant areas of expertise – like biologists, geographers, anthropologists, and so on, who can play a part in making the necessary preliminary analyses and involvement processes. If we’re going to solve the crises that the world is facing, then we as architects have got to recognize that we cannot do everything. But we can facilitate and call the right collaborative partners into play.”
Third Nature: You cannot call the citizens into play with a blank canvas
Somewhere else on Zealand, Denmark, in Kalundborg, there is another Desire project that has been working with calling the citizens into play in the development of Kalundborg’s town center.
Here, the establishment of the new architecture school, which is domiciled in an old railway station building that’s situated smack dab in the middle of the town, served as the starting signal for an urban renewal of the area around the station yard and down towards the city’s harbor.
Ole Schrøder, who is co-founding partner in Third Nature design studio (TREDJE NATUR) has been participating in facilitating the process, where a citizens’ group consisting of local activists and business people was supposed to formulate dreams and point toward ideas that can potentially give rise to a greater degree of vitality in the city center; this includes coming up with suggestions for how to bring forth a more clearly defined context for the new architectural education.
“An important lesson for us lies altogether clearly in the fact that it can be difficult for ordinary people without an architectural designer’s background to visualize anything very concrete without having before them a presentation, a sketch, or some introductory principles by which to navigate or to let themselves be inspired by. When it’s a matter of calling the citizens into play, it just doesn’t work with a blank canvas,” explains Ole Schrøder and continues:
"For this reason, what I envision is that an important role for architectural designers lies in putting their professional proficiency into play – but without proceeding too far and refraining from presenting an almost finished project to the users or citizens who eventually must be involved in the project. And finding the perfect place between the blank canvas and the cut-and-dried idea can be a difficult balance.”
On the other hand, Schrøder sees much profit from investing time and energy in the early-early phase of an urban development project:
“Citizen- and user-involvement elevates the architectural designer’s perspective, and the result of this is that one digs down, one important level, deeper into the local gait. It’s important to know the local gait. And it’s important to take this as a point of departure if cities are going to continue to maintain their own identity. So that we do not create cities and urban development that are one size fits all.”
Gehl: Art endows urban development with value
In yet a third location on Zealand, Denmark, in the town of Herlev – the architectural design studio, Gehl (Home - Gehl), has been active in investigating how art can contribute to sustainable urban development.
According to Liselott Stendfelt, partner at Gehl, the task has to do with finding new methods for how one can best evaluate the significance of an artistic effort in urban space projects. And this has to do with coming up with recommendations about how artistic efforts can better be integrated into strategies for urban development in the future.
The point of departure for the project is former industrial terrain, which has previously housed Herlev Asfalt Fabrik [the Herlev Asphalt Factory]. Today, new buildings are popping up in synch with the whole area’s being developed into a completely new urban neighborhood.
Very close to the building, a small glass dome has been erected, from where various artists – or Garden Caretakers, as they are called – have been facilitating exhibitions, landscape walking tours and workshops, with the aim of investigating how art can contribute to bringing forth new sustainable urban spaces and residential areas.
According to Liselott Stenfeldt, they are taking several important lessons from the project with them:
"From our perspective, art can help to generate enormous value for the development of our cities, and especially already in the early-early phases, where art can ever so uniquely play a role in inviting other types of discussions. The very notion of a Garden Caretaker constitutes an altogether fitting suggestion for how art can help to involve the local environment in a new dialogue about the climate,” says Liselott Stenfeldt and continues:
“There’s a great deal of potential in letting art, co-creation and the built-up environment play together, in ensemble – also regarded in the long-term perspective. To ensure that temporary initiatives are going to be used more strategically, it’s crucial that these are designed entirely correctly – and not only in terms of the artistic effort, seen in isolation, but also in relation to the physical and social context in which they are to be placed. Moreover, we’ve got to be adept at evaluating and learning from the effort, on an ongoing basis, and for this, we have a need to develop more structured methods that can demonstrate measurable results about the more subjective and altogether proximal impacts."
Danish architects are setting new standards
GXN/3XN, SLA, Third Nature and Gehl are all members of The Danish Association of Architectural Firms, a trade association with approx. 700 architectural design studios as members. The Danish Association of Architectural Firms (Danske Arkitektvirksomheder) has been a partner in the Danish-conducted Desire.
For The Danish Association of Architectural Firms, the commitment to Desire has most especially had to do with the goal of conferring upon Danish architectural design studios an active influence on – and setting new standards for – how Europe can potentially transform existing urban spaces and bring forth urban development with respect for the planet and for people’s different ways of living.
