Reflections on the Temporary Train Station at Roskilde Festival 2025

by Martin Marker, Alex Hummel Lee & Morten Meldgaard

Introduction

The temporary train station designed for Roskilde Festival 2025 emerges from a fundamental idea of community. This is not only the community staged annually through the rhythm of arrivals, music, encounters, and departures, but also a community understood as a way of inhabiting the world. The station is not the product of an architect’s singular vision but of a collaborative process involving students of architecture, carpentry apprentices, festival organizers, engineers, volunteers, and skilled tradespeople.

In this joint endeavor, 25 students from the Royal Danish Academy – Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape – worked alongside apprentices from the carpentry program at NEXT, representatives from Roskilde Festival and DSB, and a range of professionals. The outcome was not simply a building, but a temporary infrastructural hub capable of accommodating up to 125,000 passengers in the festival’s western camping area.

This approach challenges the traditional narrative of the architect as solitary creator who delivers a finished object to passive users. Instead, resources, ideas, and decisions were collectively negotiated, allowing the project to evolve through proposals, revisions, integrations, and discoveries. Here, the maxim “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” takes on tangible form, seeing that the students achieved something much more complex and on a higher professional level, that even the best of them could achieve individually.

Collective Design Process

The semester unfolded in three phases: contextual studies, sketching, and project planning. The first stage emphasized understanding the festival’s flows and rhythms: patterns of transport, the landscape, cycles of material use, and the unique social dynamics that arise when Roskilde festival temporarily becomes Denmark’s fourth largest city. Students worked in groups, but all groups addressed all themes, avoiding proprietary claims over ideas or solutions.

Dialogue with festival coordinators and DSB representatives punctuated the process at three key meetings. These exchanges did not function as conventional reviews but as dialogical milestones, enabling ideas and feedback to circulate both ways. Following the third meeting, a collective design direction was developed through a large-scale 1:50 analog model that integrated parallel proposals into one coherent expression.

Digital 3D modeling guided the project’s refinement, while carpentry apprentices constructed a 1:1 mock-up of the base module. This prototype tested assembly, disassembly, and transport. Adjustments—such as reducing the number of unique modules and repeating radius dimensions in plan—were decided in open plenary discussions, ensuring transparency and shared ownership.

Architecture as Place and Symbol

The design draws on three archetypes: the House, the Portal, and the Circle.

• The House: a transparent, lightweight structure offering shade and shelter, glowing like a beacon at night. It provides a quiet zone for rest and recharging devices—a space of safety before re-entering the festival’s intensity.
• The Portal: marking the threshold between everyday life and the festival’s temporary reality, it acts not only as a physical gateway but as a ritual passage.
• The Circle: an open gathering space, echoing the forms of the campfire ring or amphitheater, inviting waiting, conversation, and shared presence.

Placed along a gentle curve beside the railway, the station adapts to the existing terrain and symbolically embraces Camp West. At night, lighting enhances this gesture, conceptualized by students as an “embrace by light”.

Circular Principles in Practice

The project is grounded in Roskilde Festival’s guidelines for circular construction: reducing material consumption, prioritizing reuse, and designing for disassembly (Impact, 2025). Each module can be dismantled without heavy machinery, stored without damage, and reused annually. Painted in DSB red with linseed oil paint, the modules are also protected against blue-stain fungus during storage.

This philosophy resonates with the reflections presented in Collaborations: Rethinking Architectural Design (Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge, Vol. 3, No. 5, 2023), where collaboration is framed not only as a social process but also as a relationship with material, site, and time consumption. Here, architecture becomes part of a circular economy: not a consumable, but a circulating resource.

Learning Beyond Competition

Where architectural education often privileges competition and individual authorship (Collaborations, 2023), this project emphasized collective creation. Instead of asking who had the strongest idea, the group sought to produce something realizable and useful. The result is more complete, thorough and detailed than any of the students, no matter how skilled, could have achieved by themselves. But the result is shared, and in that way every student did a great project.

Students reported that this collaborative pedagogy reduced stress and performance anxiety while allowing them to contribute their strengths and learn from one another. Realizing the station also gave them the rare experience of inhabiting a space they themselves had designed and dimensioned, together with those who would use it.

Such an approach cultivates architects trained not only in professional expertise but in the skills of cooperation, collective decision-making, and shared authorship.

A Laboratory for Future Building Culture

Though temporary, the Roskilde Festival station embodies lessons with far-reaching implications. It demonstrates that architecture can integrate aesthetics, functionality, social presence, and environmental awareness without excessive resource use.

It illustrates how education can foster learning through collaboration rather than competition, strengthening communal bonds through shared creation.

In an era of climate challenges and the urgent need to rethink building culture, this project exemplifies how architecture can contribute: by treating construction as a collective endeavor, where indeed, the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts.

References:

Carnelli, E., Marcolini, F., Marino, F., & Sousa Santos, R. (eds.) (2023). Collaborations: Rethinking Architectural Design. Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge, 3(5). Transcript Verlag.

IMPACT The Roskilde Festival Group’s Goals and Results for Sustainable Development / 2024, Roskilde, 2025.

Image Credits: Morten Meldgaard