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The scheme creates a new assembly of buildings that brings together the entire Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts: the Valand Academy, the School of Design and Crafts (HDK), and the Academy of Music and Drama (HSM). The site is located next to Götaplatsen, one of Gothenburg’s most central squares, and will, through its strategic urban position, further strengthen the capacity of these art faculties to interact with current events in society and the city.
The competition phase included a strategic development plan for the entire campus: how to best distribute the university library and the artistic institutions within existing and new buildings, and how this could open up the University to foster better interaction with its neighbouring districts, which possess very different characters.
The campus, already a place of high cultural heritage value, is laid out around a beautiful park and contains several listed buildings that add to its dense historical context. Further adding to the complexity of the brief, entrances to the new West Link underground station were to be integrated into the new buildings.
The Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts is housed in a series of interconnected new buildings, which also incorporate the existing structure containing practice studios for dance and music. It forms an entire urban block around a closed courtyard that doubles as an open-air workshop.
The northern building sits on a corner next to the Art Museum and the City Theatre, marking the arrival of the university at the core of the city’s cultural centre. Its structure is deliberately matter-of-fact, with atelier spaces stacked on top of one another to form an almost industrial, rhythmic façade. At the top, a series of pitched roofs provide skylights that also signal the purpose of the building to its context. The use of deep red and light yellow bricks allows the new buildings to complement the existing urban environment and its neoclassical architecture, a legacy from the Gothenburg Tercentennial Jubilee Exposition of 1923.
