Copenhagen.IslandDistrict.

Copenhagen. Island District

Monday 5 September – Friday 16 December 2022

The Danish capital, Copenhagen, has historically grown by leveraging and connecting islets to expand the available land on which to build the city. The Autumn Semester Programme 2022 will focus on exploring the artificial islet of Refshaleøen in Copenhagen, addressing plans for its expansion to create a new neighbourhood. The future impact of climate change in Copenhagen is likely to be serious, and significant increases in the severity and frequency of flooding in the area have been predicted. With this in mind, our programme will explore the dialogue between water and land and between landscape and urban design in this context.

Refshaleøen faces the sea forts of Trekroner to the north and Flakfortet to the west; the expansion of the site, which is set to transform Copenhagen’s industrial north harbour into a new city, will be the largest metropolitan development in northern Europe. Participants in the Autumn Semester Programme 2022 will explore urban scale to understand the different conditions within the site and suggest new vocations for the neighbourhood. We will examine the existing architectural typologies and socioeconomic profiles present in this context by analysing both tangible and intangible conditions at the water’s edge. Each student will develop their own brief to target specific design challenges relating to the insertion of new developments within the existing urban fabric. The city will be understood as layers of information that together reveal drawing and mapping qualities, which will inform students’ own design narratives.

Participants will be invited to develop their own aesthetic style throughout the programme, creating an ongoing dialogue between two- and three-dimensional explorations that reveal unpredictable qualities and inspire their design narratives. Students’ proposals will be multi-scalar in scope, enabling their architectural propositions to respond to larger narratives relating to the aesthetic, programmatic and socioeconomic capacities of the city and its infrastructure.

Kaiser Ke

Manuel Rademaker

Chengxi Liu

Chun Ngok Osten Chan

Simone Chait

Danielle Ryba

Manan Jain

Antonio Carmagnani