Trælasten

The new urban district, Trælasten, is located right next to Aarhus Å, the river which runs through Aarhus. The former industrial plot covers 40.000 m2 and used to house the city’s lumberyard. Now the area is being transformed into a new sustainable neighborhood. Community, livability, and sustainability are keywords in the transformation process, and the vision is to create a green, vibrant, and appealing go-to place in Aarhus full of life and atmosphere.

BRIQ is a part of the team behind the transformation – and we are working closely together with PensionDanmark and their team of advisors to bring this vision into life.

Urban development plan

BRIQ has been part of creating the urban development plan and the vision for the project together with Gehl Architects. At BRIQ, our main responsibility is to create an open and inviting urban life in the area. Our approach is site-specific and takes the history of the site as its starting point. As the area is an old industrial production site, key themes are production, craftsmanship, resource awareness and a strong connection between town and river. From these BRIQ has created unique identities and programs for the different areas, urban spaces, and extroverted ground floor spaces. It is the vision that the future retailers and urban life concepts of Trælasten relate to these key themes.

Furthermore, we have worked with two overarching themes – community and sustainability – which connect the past and the future and becomes unifying references for all the activities at the new Trælasten – both temporary and permanent.

Identity and temporary activities

BRIQ’s experience is that temporary activities are crucial to bring a new narrative to life and succeed in creating a vibrant urban area. As a first step in the development process, we created the visual identity for Trælasten through a citizen involving hand-on workshop on site.

At Trælasten, we work purposefully to ensure that actors and concepts are involved from an early stage, and we pursue to translate the meanwhile programs into permanent functions when the district is ready. We also promote the actors to think beyond the boundaries of their own lease, ensure co-creation and ensure a continuing focus on the vision and strategy going forward. In our view, the coherence and synergies between concepts are crucial to the success of creating a new urban destination such as Trælasten.

Åens Hus

We are also designing the sustainable neighborhood house, Åens Hus, which will house a wide range of community functions and play a key role in manifesting Trælasten’s vision of cultivating the grounds for communities and building sustainable architecture reusing materials from the industrial site. Åens Hus is presented at this link: Åens Hus.