Green Campus on a green Danish island

In 2018, a new campus building was inaugurated that gathers together all Bornholm’s education in one place. The physical merger of the island’s youth, adult and continuing education was one of the largest projects ever on Bornholm. The aim of merging all the programs into a single campus community was to create an attractive, coherent and diverse learning environment in which all education resources are fully exploited and where students and staff can meet naturally in everyday life.

The building’s architecture is characterized by its striking reinterpretation of classical design elements. The building consists of three levels that are staggered horizontally to create areas for group work, self-study and socializing. The design scheme also draws inspiration from the wider Bornholm context, with floors built up around a larger and a smaller square, inspired by Rønne town center. The atrium space serves a communication function as well as flooding the interior with light and ventilation. The architecture is conceived to support modern forms of teaching, with plenty of rooms for work in larger and smaller groups, classrooms, auditoriums and larger living areas.

The overall concept helps to break down barriers between programs and to facilitate easy interaction and exchange between students and staff. Applying a sustainable building concept meant that heating and cooling energy is drawn from renewable sources. Campus Bornholm uses ground-source heat pumps to extract energy from the ground via a series of boreholes. At the same time, the building envelope plays an active role in the heating and cooling distribution system. As well as floor heating, the Campus features Thermally Activated Building Structures (TABS). TABS use the large thermal mass of concrete structures as a buffer for changing cooling or heating loads during the day. It does this by running hot or cold water through pipes within the concrete slabs.

From the start, the vision was to create a unique building. In line with Bornholm’s “Bright Green Island” vision, the building is heated and cooled by groundsource heat pumps that use a 9 km network of ground source collectors. 1,100 m2 of solar cells provide around one fifth of the building’s total electricity consumption.