Kongelunden Vision Competition

We seek to re-establish the idea of sport being brought together in Kongelunden: a Sports Forest, where many different sports can meet, coexist, and interact beneath the forest canopy in a shared community with all the other users who choose Kongelunden as the setting for their recreational activities.

Our vision is to create a facility where buildings and users do not turn their backs on one another and create inactive rear sides, but instead form a concentrated architectural conglomerate, an Agora, with clear connections to the many surrounding elements of Kongelunden. At the same time, the vision is to emphasize the site’s unique landscape position on the hillside among the forest trees, ensuring that Kongelunden does not turn inward on itself but instead reaches out and connects with neighbouring areas.

This vision is realised through a process of densification within the development. Buildings are brought together and concentrated to enhance both functionality and the overall visitor experience, while the forest itself is strengthened through denser tree planting, making the woodland character more visible and reinforcing the narrative of sport among the trees.

Our approach to the project is rooted in the landscape section, which describes Kongelunden’s terrain as a series of terraces and horizontal plateaus, partly shaped by the Ice Age and partly created through human intervention. Each plateau is assigned its own programme, while transitions between functions are marked by slopes that double as spectator terraces. In this way, the glacial landscape that forms the setting not only for Kongelunden but for Aarhus as a whole is made visible.