SLA creates The Oasis for Roskilde Festival’s Artzone


The epicenter for Northern Europe’s biggest music and arts festival, Roskilde Festival, is a lush nature-based architecture setting designed by renowned Danish landscape architects SLA.

When the arts program for this year’s 5-day Roskilde Festival opens Wednesday afternoon, the festival’s poetry readings, performances and artwork displays will take place in a nature-based and lush setting, designed by renowned Danish landscape architects SLA.

The project, called THE OASIS, is the epicenter of this year’s Art Zone at Roskilde Festival.

With THE OASIS, SLA creates an organic and sensuous nature space for performances, poetry readings, artworks and informal social gatherings. 70 trees form a close and lush frame around a large oval scene and bind each artwork together in a common space. Around the scene a green hill terrain with trees, furniture, wood stumps and gigantic ‘grass pillows’ is made – providing room for social meetings, for relaxation and to enjoy THE OASIS’s landscape on the border between man-made art and nature.

ART, NATURE AND SOCIAL LIFE
THE OASIS creates a framework for ART ZONE, in which the individual artworks can unfold and be experienced in conjunction with stage performances, other guests and nature. The close connection between the artistic, the organic and the social creates its own complex character, in which the disintegration between man-made and non-man-made forms a very own, sensuous world.
The idea behind THE OASIS has been conceptualized by Roskilde Festival’s Curator Team. The design is made by SLA.

PART OF A BIGGER DEVELOPMENT
THE OASIS is only the latest project in SLA’s ongoing nature-based development of the Roskilde Festival Site. Since 2014, SLA has been in charge of designing and developing the 3,000,000 m2 site of Roskilde Festival to provide value and attractions year-round. Creating a unique symbiosis of art, nature and social activities, SLA has, amongst many other things, created swimming lakes with integrated artworks, new nature trails and raw urban setting for MUSICON, the new entrepreneurial ‘art city’ of Roskilde.

“By using the process as a driver for permanent value-creation, THE OASIS will not only improve the artistic festival experience of Roskilde Festival’s 80,000 guests. It will also create value for the local citizens, for the creative community in Roskilde’ MUSICON town and for the diverse nature-life that exist in the area –long after the Roskilde Festival,” says SLA founder and world-renowned landscape architect Stig L. Andersson.

Thus, THE OASIS will be part of the processual development to give value outside the festival period: After the festival, all THE OASIS’s 70 trees will be relocated and planted out in MUSICON and in the festival site area – thus contributing to the continuing nature-based developing of the entire area.

 

Design Firm | SLA

Images Credit | Courtesy of SLA

About Damian Holmes 3245 Articles
Damian Holmes is the Founder and Editor of World Landscape Architecture (WLA). He is a registered landscape architect (AILA) working in international design practice in Australia. Damian founded WLA in 2007 to provide a website for landscape architects written by landscape architects. Connect on Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/damianholmes/