Trekroner School

The school is situated in a hilly landscape with four surrounding wing houses, containing the ‘home areas’ for tutoring. The remaining school programs are placed centrally in the school. Here you have the school kitchen, workshop, SFO, auditoriums, football pitch, and many others. In this way, the seasons and the landscape become an integrated part of the education.

The children will experience the change of seasons as they walk the distance from the ‘home areas’ to one of the designated project spaces. Hence nurturing a natural integration amongst the children and providing a consciousness of the entire school premises and the landscape, it is a part of.

In many ways, Trekroner is ‘the little school inside the bigger school’ – even though it grew to four groups in each year in 2017. To make the younger students feel more at home, their ‘home areas’ only span one storey and have consequently been placed with direct contact to the outside and the playground. These house wings have simultaneously been placed away from the older students’ ‘home areas’. The older students’ ‘home areas’ are placed where the terrain drops an entire floor, and span across two storeys.

‘The Garden of Knowledge’ is placed together with the other educational spaces in the middle of the complex. The garden is a 1:1-lab for a series of practical classes.’”The Garden of Knowledge” is designed to be a part of the learning process in, for example, natural science and cooking. We have a herbal garden, a vegetable garden, and we have fruit trees too; so the children can experience the change of seasons and harvest the food themselves. I remember from my time in school how dull it was to sit in the small, fully paved courtyards’, says Torsten Stephensen, partner at Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects. 

With its light brick walls, Trekroner appears as a balanced, light, and monolithic complex in the green landscape. Ventilation chimneys have been included in the architecture that, combined with grates placed in ankle height, lets the buildings heave in fresh air without mechanical control and closed windows.