Roskilde Festival College — A modern classic for the pioneering and unconventional college

Roskilde Festival College strives to combine the old with the new – the classic morning song and the loose spirit of the festival. Aesthetics are hugely significant, as it is one of the means by which Roskilde Festival College can express its pioneering and unconventional way of running a college. The evergreen Kevi design from 1958 perfectly fitted this dichotomy of modern and historic with its young, yet classic look and stackable features.

Case: Roskilde Festival College
Location: Roskilde, Denmark 
Products: Kevi 
2060 chairs
Architect: Ramsing & co
Year: 2019
Photographer: Lennart Søgaard-Høyer

About the project

Roskilde Festival College is a new addition to and a whole new way of thinking about the Archdean heritage, which is the college movement. Although colleges have existed as cultural institutions for almost hundreds of years, the idea can well be built on top, expanded and improved.

As a new development of this tradition-rich phenomenon, Roskilde Festival University strives to combine the old with the new. So there must be a collision between classic morning song and the loose spirit of the festival.

Here, aesthetics are hugely significant, as it is one of the means by which Roskilde Festival University can really express its pioneering and unconventional way of running a college. However, it should not be solely aesthetics that characterize the college’s choice of seating furniture – practicality and changing is also an important part of being able to adapt the chairs to the many different rooms and assemblies that take place, and durability should also be a priority when After all, the chairs must be used by all the countless people who will attend college through time.
 
With these two high standards, Montana Furniture/Engelbrechts was the ideal company to supply the conference chairs that would help define and characterize the university’s unique appearance. Roskilde Festival University chose the chair model Kevi for several reasons:

  • The chair has been developed with a focus on being as practical as organizing, stacking and positioning as possible. Therefore, a very large amount of chairs can be stored in a very small area. It is a great advantage when you are a college that has only a limited amount of space to store things.
  • A colour that is very much associated with Roskilde Festival is the clear and distinctive orange color that characterizes everything from advertisements to the biggest stage of the festival. This color, of course, goes again when it comes to college. The lecture hall, which is always a beating heart in colleges, is therefore also completely orange. 
  • The choice of the orange colour for the chairs was therefore extremely important and something that Engelbrechts could help with.

To make it easier to line up the chairs, they are purchased with fittings that allow the chairs to be assembled to form a whole. In this way, the chairs can be set up at very straight and even rows. These many customization options and things that make it easier to adapt the chairs to just Roskilde Festival College lecture hall made Montana Furniture / Engelbrechts the final choice when the chairs were to be ordered and made.
 
Roskilde Festival University utilized the great freedom in terms of colours and special solutions that Montana Furniture / Engelbrechts offers to the fullest. A flashy orange colour was chosen which, as a symbol of the Roskilde Festival itself, makes the chairs both significant and unique in their radiance. In contrast to this, the same chair was chosen, but in more classic colours for the canteen. In this way, the chairs create a pervasive theme that makes Roskilde Festival Højskole and their premises something for themselves – but also for something together, as a larger whole. And the “bigger whole” is what both colleges and festivals are all about.

Kevi — Chairs and tables for homes and offices

The origin of the Kevi design dates back to 1958 when Danish architect Jørgen Rasmussen created the Kevi swivel chair. With the invention of the double-wheel castors, the chair quickly went on to become an international success.

After nearly 60 years on wheels, it was time to renew the iconic design, and the four-legged Kevi was born. Besides a range of chairs that vary in size and height, the series also includes tables and stools – in total, 25 variants.

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