With girls from Himmelev Gymnasium and Roskilde Pigefodbold (girls football club) and supported by Roskilde Municipality, The Danish Foundation for Culture and Sports Facilities and Nykredits Fond, we have developed the idea of a new sports and meeting place to promote relationships, health, and well-being among young people, and especially among girls aged 13-19 years.
A new everyday meeting place
Inspired by third place thinking, the project gives the girls a new kind of everyday meeting place, where school, social life, sports, and community activities can intertwine in a way that is meaningful to them. The building will serve different purposes and functions, but primarily become an informal place to meet, hang out, and do joint activities during breaks, after school, before and after matches and training. A new 660 m2 extension of the high school’s sports hall, which is adjacent to the currently least attractive football pitches at Himmelev sports complex, forms the meeting place. The extension will connect, intertwine, and increase the value of the existing hall and pitches. The new building has a wooden construction and will be in modules. The girls’ wishes and needs have determined its light and bright expression and the programming of space.
Multi-functionality
The house will accommodate a small kitchen and café and a larger shared space, from which there will be a view of the hall and a lookout over the football facilities. Two multi-purpose rooms are flexible and can hold different user specific activities, meetings or integrated into the shared area for larger events. The shared space´s center is a continuous multi-functional stairwell that connects the ground floor with the loft and roof terrace and the ground floor with an extended basement with new locker rooms, primarily for the girls’ football teams.
Exciting potential as a meeting place
Fletværket is not only a place for girls, but it also has an exciting potential to become a vibrant local meeting place in an area of Roskilde where there is no natural center. In addition to 700-800 high school students and four hundred football girls, the hall and the football facilities have multiple other users, and the local area has schools, day care institutions and residents in private and public housing. Fletværket will be part of Roskilde Municipality’s new development plan for Himmelev sports complex and the project’s partners are working to raise the necessary funding. The project has a total budget of 20 million DKK including outdoor areas and should be ready for the start of school and football season 2025/2026.
Research and innovation in everyday meeting places
Fletværket is part of a test case in a research and innovation collaboration between Roskilde University, Cornelius Vöge, Boligselskabet Sjælland (social housing company) and supported by the Innovation Fund Denmark. Industrial Ph.D. student Xiabo (Mimi) Shen contributed to and followed the user and design process. The focus is not only on the physical design, but also how meeting places socially and organizationally can benefit from involving processes, and how communities can organize around places and not just around particular activities. Fletværket is the outcome of an extensive stakeholder and user process over two years. Cornelius Vöge has been responsible for all facilitation of stakeholder meetings, vision days, workshops and interviews with girls, managers, teachers, coaches, residents, and others.
