Trekroner School
Location: Roskilde, Denmark
Client: Municipality of Roskilde
Team: Stig L. Andersson,
Stine Poulsen, Hans Kragh,
Christian Restorff-Liligreen
Collaborators: Vilhelm
Lauritzen Architects
Design phase: 1999-2001
Construction: 2001-2002
Area: 2,2 ha.
Cost of construction: 1,1 mill. €
The school playground is conceived as a ‘garden of knowledge’ framed by the school buildings which have no corridors, so to get from one block to another everyone has to go outside and feel the weather and the changes of nature.
The outdoor space of a school has a large influence on the children’s development and well-being, learning and social interchange. At Trekroner the contouring of the playground encourages the children to move in many different ways when playtime arrives. Girls and boys play together – in contrast to the traditional school playground where the genders are often divided by an invisible boundary.
The playground functions as a game-board that is constantly being developed by the pupils, teachers and parents, and in addition allows passers-by to take a short cut across the playground, so that the space is also used after school.
Babies and toddlers from the crèche play in the sand and roller-bladers use it in the evenings. The playground at Trekroner School demonstrates that good physical surroundings can stimulate children and adults to move and play, and the project is considered to be something special in the field of educational research.
In May 2005, Søren Nagbøl and Mogens Hansen from the Institute for Educational Sociology, Denmark’s University of Education, presented current research at a meeting for the school’s parents which indicates that the pupils of Trekroner
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move more
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use larger areas of the playground
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play together more across the genders than in other playgrounds in the project
The research uses quantitative and qualitative methods, which i.a. reveals the pupils’ naming and identity relationship with the playground. The research results are not yet published.
