This place is a veritable string of pearls. Ragnarock Museum – a wild golden colossus dedicated to rock music – stands alongside the eye-catching architecture of Roskilde Festival Folk High School, both of which were designed by a Danish-Dutch team of architects. Between the two, you’ll find the self-grown maker workshop, where the very idea of creating throughout one’s life is imbued in its architecture. The workshop’s wooden floor was taken from a burned-down sports hall and reused here. The lines from the former handball court are still visible on the workshop floor.
A walk through Musicon is a journey through an incredible urban development project that all started when the concrete factory Unicon vacated the premises in the late 1990s. Suddenly the city found itself with a huge, centrally-located site that connects Roskilde’s historic city center and its renowned festival grounds. To form a meaningful connection between these two elements, the neighborhood was given the name Musicon.
The first movers, who had already spotted the opportunity offered by the available site – dancers, musicians, painters and skaters – were invited to the table to join the brainstorming process preceding the launch of specific urban development planning.
Today you can see the creative approach at every turn. There’s the rainwater overflow facility Rabalderparken, which serves as a park for hundreds of skaters when it is dry. You’ll also find street art, new architecture and creative housing – not to mention all of the nooks and crannies where the unexpected is just waiting to happen.
In other words: Musicon has soul.
Facts
- The container strip is a collection of small shops, including a microbrewery, yarn store and tattoo parlor, housed in shipping containers.
- Musicon will have 1,000 residences once it is fully developed, in a variety of sizes and ownership forms, including owner-occupied apartments, youth housing, and social housing.
- Hal 12 skate park, Aaben Dans dance theater, and Roskilde Festival Folk High School.
- A mixture of temporary and permanent buildings.
The surroundings
Musicon is located surprisingly close to both Roskilde Station and the historic city center. The seven-minute walk from the station along the Musicon Trail is full of notable attractions. There’s a BMX/skateboard pump track, Roskilde Ring park and Knud Munk’s brutalist county building from 1976, which is now Roskilde’s city hall.
At the opposite end of Rabalderstræde, Musicon is adjacent to Dyrskuepladsen, where the annual Roskilde Festival is held. The two areas are divided by a highway, but an artistic pedestrian bridge above the highway is slated for completion in 2020 or 2021.
