A student competition for flexible student accommodation resulted in close collaboration between a team of KADK’s architecture students and carpenter apprentices from the Copenhagen Carpentry Guild. In one week they constructed the winning project, ‘The Generic Residential Cell’, on Copenhagen’s City Hall Square. In a tangible way, the project united research and education with practice and industry.
The project started as part of the School of Architecture’s 6-week teaching module for 3rd-year students, in which Jan Søndergaard, Professor at the Institute for Architecture and Technology, in collaboration with Copenhagen Carpentry Guild and Copenhagen Technical College, organised a competition for the students. The project was to design a student dwelling, which could be added to. ‘The Generic Residential Cell’ was the winner.
‘The Generic Residential Cell’ is a flexible type of student dwelling, which can easily be developed and made bigger, simply by adding on more residential cells: hence, the title ‘generic’.
A symbol of the future
This semester four architecture students have been interns at KHR Arkitekter, where they worked further on ‘The Generic Residential Cell’. The internship culminated in the erection of the cell on City Hall Square in Copenhagen, where it was allowed to remain for a week as part of the Copenhagen Carpentry Guild’s 500th anniversary. The project is a symbol of an innovative future for carpentry and construction.
Collaborators
A number of collaborators were responsible for ‘The Generic Residential Cell’: KADK, Copenhagen Carpentry Guild, KHR Arkitekter, Fiberline Composite and Copenhagen Technical College.
