Kannikegården, new church hall by Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter
14/02/2017.
[Ribe] Denmark
metalocus, DANIEL MADERA
metalocus, DANIEL MADERA
Description of the project by Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter
The building houses functions for the parochial church council and the staff at the church. At the same time, it functions as a hospitable setting for public events for the town’s citizens, such as talks, concerts and film screenings.
The project task was faced with a special challenge: Ancient discoveries, telling us about Danish history over the past thousand years, have been found on the building site. The archaeological excavations have uncovered remains of Denmark’s oldest christian cemetery from 800 A.D., originating from the transition period from the Viking to the Christian ages. Most visible however, is a listed brick ruin from the Augus-tine Canon’s monastery dating back to the 1100s. The ruin is integrated into an exhibition space de-signed to communicate the many cultural historic layers of the location
The building consists of a single, oblong volume with a pitched roof, supported by pillars above the preserved archaeological findings. The length of the building is located along the square with a scale and roof pitch following the neighbouring buildings on the square, thus adapting to the surrounding city scale. The archetypical shape of the volume is given a sculptural crookedness towards the south, to bring more light and air towards the neighbour buildings behind. Here, an intimate green courtyard is established along the streets Sønderportsgade and Rykind.
The project draws several threads to the place of cultural and historical heritage, where the past meets the present. It is an interesting symbolic point that the brick ruin, by virtue of its original function as a refectory of the ancient monastery, is a distant ancestor of the new building. It's also interesting that the brick ruin and the new building Kannikegården tell a story of the use of masonry through a period of 1000 years. The Danish Culture Agency considers the ruin to be the best-preserved building fragment among the oldest brick-stone buildings, and is therefore regarded as a protected monument.
The main volume consists of a simple steel frame enveloped by lightweight prefabricated façade ele-ments. The volume rests on in-situ cast columns that grow out from an in-situ concrete base on the ground floor. The base merges the various levels around the building with supporting walls, and frames the ruin space approx. 2,5 m under the main square level.
The upper volume is covered with specially developed façade tiles in reddish brown shades comparable to the city’s and the region’s characteristic, brick houses - but as a more contemporary interpretation due to the hovering tectonics of the building. The shingles are hung in an overlapping fashion, like fish scales, and frame the windows of the interior spaces.
The lower section appears with glass facades, and ensures an open cross section through the building exposing the ruin space to the surrounding urban context. The transparent façade is interrupted by pivoting oak planks that create exterior sun shading as well as human size viewing spaces into the building.
Lundgaard & Tranberg Arkitekter is a leading Danish architectural office founded by Boje Lundgaard y Lene Tranberg in 1984, which they owned, managed and developed together until 2004. The office provides a wide range of professional architectural services, including urban and landscape planning as well as product and furniture design. For more than 25 years, they have made a name for themselves participating in competitions and realizing a wide range of projects, and positioned the company as one of Denmark’s most renowned and award-winning architectural offices.
Over the years, many of their architects have cooperated with leading knowledge centres on research and pilot building projects focusing on the improvement of building products and processes and particularly on sustainable housing. It has been awarded many national and international prizes and widely published in books and leading periodicals worldwide. The office has particularly made a name for itself for the ability to “read” or empathise with a given location and integrate the individual project with the surrounding environment in a striking yet harmonious manner.
Lundgaard & Tranberg has won the prestigious RIBA European Award (awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects) several times, most recently for the Harbour Isle Apartments, Copenhagen, and the SEB Bank & Pension headquarters, Copenhagen, in 2011.