Going Danish at Hobsonville High, NZ
19 Jun 2016
We were very fortunate to have Danish architect Jens Guldbaek and his educator daughter Mie Guldbaek Broens present to us at Hobsonville Point High School.
And what a great night, seriously interesting.
Jens was the designer of the now quite famous Hellerup School in Denmark, this was one of the early ILE projects that really kicked off the changes in school design that we are all engaging with now. See attached Hellerup school images. Possibly you might recognise this space?
The evening was very successful and became more of a conversation rather than a formal presentation. There was a special atmosphere in the room.
Jens and Mie talked about their work, focussing principally on interior layouts and the criticality of getting the acoustic design sorted in these open learning environments. They discussed how the knowledge around this acoustic design is still building and is currently far from being fully understood. They also talked about various other European design firms project work and shared images of some interesting exemplars.
Interestingly they also said that the New Zealand contemporary school design scene was as good and in many cases better than a lot of overseas examples.
Their practice now mainly does school design advising, the firm is called LOOP, they have a really good resource base of images, which you might find useful. A PDF of their presentation can be downloaded below.
Thanks to those that participated.
Hamish Boyd
Learning Environments NZ
