FABRIKKEN for Kunst og Design

The building rose around 1939 as the city's central laundry, designed by Copenhagen's city architect of the time, and for roughly fifty years it laundered the linen of the capital. By the 1980s it had closed, and, as happened across Copenhagen in those years, artists searching for cheap space began to move in and use it.

What makes FABRIKKEN unusual is how the conversion was actually carried out. Rather than a renovation imposed from above, much of the work was organised as a form of job activation. In an era when long term public support was available, the arrangement became that anyone who wished to work in the building would also spend part of their time renovating it, learning real skills in the process. People could be paid, while on welfare, to improve the very place they worked in. Craftspeople, artists and local politicians organised it together, the City of Copenhagen formalised it as a foundation in 1991, and the old laundry slowly became a working art house. From the start the City made the building available without rent, and added an annual operating grant until 2000.

For a municipality holding a derelict building and a population of underused talent, the model folds three problems into a single solution. The building is restored, people gain skills and income, and a cultural institution is created, all from the same effort.

Most residencies last from a few months to a couple of years, which is enough for a single project but rarely enough to develop a practice. FABRIKKEN deliberately takes the long view. An artist receives a permit for three years, renewable three times, for up to twelve years in the building. The result is the largest artist community in the country, with the longest tenure, and a remarkable spread of ages working side by side, from twenty two to eighty five. The exchange across generations is so free that, as the team likes to say, you often cannot tell whether a work in the hall was made by the youngest artist or the oldest.

A condition written into the agreement requires that the artists in the building reflect the artists of the city: the same balance of disciplines, of genders and of generations. Selection considers age only in that context. No one is too old or too young in the abstract; an applicant simply has to fit the field, work professionally and genuinely need the space. It is a quiet safeguard against a house slowly narrowing into a club of one kind of person.

The City owns the building, and the foundation has the right to use it strictly for the production of art, with no subletting, no businesses and no retail. In return for honouring a short list of obligations, chiefly five public events each year together with clear rules on who may work there and for how long, the foundation is otherwise free to do as it wishes inside, while the listed facade remains untouched. The trust this has built is measurable. Contract renewals, once required every three years, now run every ten, as the house has delivered on its promises and grown from 55 artists to nearly 80, relieving a genuine problem for a city that had lost many such spaces to demolition. A substantial application is now in progress to upgrade the building, not to polish it into something glossy but to fit more artists with better facilities.