Cultural school's new headquarters to promote creativity

While building KNUDEN cultural school’s new headquarters in Kristiansand, emphasis was placed on creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere for the school’s pupils in order to promote creativity. Troldtekt acoustic panels were chosen as an acoustic solution for several of the spaces. 

In 2022, the municipal cultural school KNUDEN was able to open its doors to its new headquarters at Silokaia in the new neighbourhood of Kanalbyen in Kristiansand. The KNUDEN cultural school is a gathering place for 600 children and young people who want to expand their horizons through creative subjects and forms of expression, and is one of several departments within Kristiansand Municipality’s cultural offerings. The school offers extracurricular activities in dance, music, theatre, visual arts, film and photography, and also organises its own concerts and performances.

In Kanalbyen, with the two cultural institutions Kunstsilo and Kilden Performing Arts Centre as neighbours, KNUDEN cultural school has the ambition to be a key player in Kristiansand's future cultural quarter, which the three buildings form together.

During the construction of the cultural school, the focus was on using traditional materials and sustainable solutions such as recyclable materials and materials that can last the entire life of the building, as well as using solar panels as an energy source.

The cultural school is built on five floors, connected by a spacious foyer with a main staircase that makes it easy to find your way around the building and move from floor to floor. In the foyer itself as well as in the staircase and corridors, Troldtekt natural wood acoustic panels were used, which, together with the building’s wooden walls, the yellow colour of the staircase and the colourful, playful artwork placed around the building, create a warm, safe and welcoming atmosphere, while at the same time reducing reverberation in the large open space. 

Space for different forms of creative expression

The school’s wide range of extracurricular activities require a variety of spaces built for different forms of creative expression and teaching methods, and in several of them Troldtekt solutions were chosen to absorb sound.

The black and white box spaces are used for dance lessons and theatre performances, and here the Troldtekt line design solution in black and white on the walls not only contributes to good acoustics in the spaces, but can also be used in performances, for example, depending on whether one wants a dark or light ambience for the performance in question.

In the school’s sound studio, Troldtekt panels in natural wood were chosen for the ceiling and Troldtekt line for the walls, while in the smaller classrooms Troldtekt panels in natural wood were also chosen for the ceilings. In all of the spaces, the acoustic panels ensure a pleasant acoustic indoor climate when practising and playing music.