rikke@onefemalearchitect.dk

The RUC film, one of 3 films which constitutes an important conceptual basis for this diploma, ends by classifying RUC as a "none-place": A sad statement for an educational institution of 77.000 square metres and 8000 students. What is one to do about such a statement?
You face the fight and acknowledge that there is precisely nothing to do at RUC except from studying, that RUC consists only of academic m2. Thus one attempts to create a place which is attractive enough, so that students choose to go to RUC, instead of staying in Copenhagen.

The starting point of the diploma was to define the phenomenon "university life" so that the project was not only based on considerations concerning planning, but also on human life in and around universities: the life which defines university environment more than buildings and lectures. Acquiring knowledge is not merely to be understood as an academic activity, it is equally a question of being present in intense social relations: the fact that learning is thriving more if students really want to learn than if they feel that they have to do so, which social space helps to strengthen.

In practice this project reshapes and modifies the existing expansion plans of RUC: plans which show a complete lack of vision, as the desired northward expansion does not help strengthening university life. Rather an already sparsly populated university area is expanded to twice its former space. The absense of well defined arrival points and rendezvous is not included in the existing expansion, and the lack of social activities is equally ignored. These problems should have been addressed in the program of the expansion competition: For without deciding what kind of place RUC should be, RUC will remain a NONE-PLACE.