MOS Architects

Krabbesholm Høgskole Extension . Skive

MOS Architects . + Krabbesholm

MOS’s buildings at Krabbesholm Højskole organize the school’s workspaces into four centralized houses accommodating architecture, art, and design studios as well as a smaller photography studio.

The new buildings expand studio and workshop space by 600m2.
Situated in the town of Skive between the Krabbesholm Forest to the west and the Limfjord Bay marina to the east, Krabbesholm is one of Denmark’s oldest universities. The campus is composed of more than a dozen independent buildings surrounding the main building, Krabbesholm Manor, dating to 1565. Galvanizing a heightened developmental pace is the school’s relatively newfound title of design school. Here guests stay at the Pardo house designed by American artist Jorge Pardo and students exhibit their work at the Four Boxes Gallery designed by Japanese architects Atelier Bow-Wow. 
MOS’s design for Krabbesholm’s new studios takes the students’ workspaces, previously insularly housed wall-to-wall, and places them in open rooms with greater possibilities for interdisciplinary interaction and arrangements of desks and furniture. The new campus buildings aggregate at the northern end of campus, centralizing student workspaces to a so-called “teaching village” in order to avoid the establishment of independent specialized teaching units.
Modern farmhouses oriented along skewed axes, the new studios disrupt the site’s grid in favor irregular, partially enclosed intermediate spaces. The hope is to bring about a more spontaneous dialogue between the disciplines, each housed in its own wing of the new school, for an integration of forms of creativity. Large windows and covered porches contribute to an informal communication between the buildings, creating a physical openness between studios as well as to nature, while a series of graveled paths and partly enclosed pockets mediate between the surrounding corridors, the ground, and outdoor spaces. These spaces create opportunities for physical and visual encounters as well as impromptu art galleries.
Wooden skeletons form the base of the structure while eternit fiber cement panels clad the façades. Use of the pitched-roof, long-house building typology prevalent at Krabbesholm formally ties the addition to the rest of the campus. The form allots greater headroom in the studios as well as mezzanine levels topping the covered porches.
Further plans at Krabbesholm aim to establish a divide between and further centralize student living spaces, workshops, and studios. Plans to demolish the current student dorms found adjacent to new studios would give way for the art and graphic design departments while student housing would relocate to the ‘Handværkerbygningen’ next to the Four Boxes gallery.

Architect: MOS, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample
Collaborators: Kurt Finsten
Structural Engineer: Hanif Kara, AKT