Detail 02 · the funding
Students raised 52.5 million to rebuild their own house.
CBS bought the building for 30 million. The rebuild the students had to fund themselves. Over eighteen months the steering group raised DKK 52.5 million from six foundations — and discovered along the way that the 2013 budget no longer held.
- Raised in grants
- DKK 52.5m
- Incl. the CBS purchase
- DKK 82.5m
- Foundations
- 6
- First commitment
- 2015
- 2013 budget
- DKK 55.3m
- Recalculated to Q3 2018
- DKK 75.7m
The funding strategy
Solbjerg Plads, 7 March 2013The building was transferred into Freja Ejendomme on 1 January 2013 and put up for sale around 1 February. Five weeks later there was a confidential strategy paper. It is not a wish list: every foundation had been read, assessed against its own purpose, ranked in order of priority and assigned to a named person.
How the paper was built
Each foundation got four columns. This was not research for its own sake — the columns decided what the application to that particular foundation should emphasise.
Priority order and ownership
The order was set in advance. The right-hand column is what actually happened — as the archive shows it today.
The reserve list
Nine foundations sat under the heading “not yet prioritised”, most with empty fields. One of them went on to give seven million.
The plan that was not followed
The aim in 2013 was for the foundations to pay for both the purchase and the rebuild, after which the building would be handed to CBS for nothing. CBS would then cover running costs, while an independent organisation had use of the premises.
It went differently: CBS bought the building itself for DKK 30m in December 2014, and the foundations funded the rebuild. The independent organisation did become real — first as an association, later as Station Fonden.
The commitments
Status November 2016Six foundations and CBS. The amounts are those the steering group reported to the foundations in November 2016.
The 2014 budget
Main itemsThe project worked from this budget for a long time. Two items stood as options, to be built only if the funding stretched that far.
When the budget was stress-tested
November 2016The original budget was drawn up in the summer of 2013 by Rønnow Arkitekter and Bascon. Three years later it was reviewed item by item with the client adviser and CBS Campus Development.
The calculations showed that a reduced scope of the base project — without the options — could be delivered within the commitments already in hand. The steering group judged that a reduced building programme would still support the core activities of the house.
What was postponed
The steering group’s decisionTo keep the project within the commitments secured, three sub-tasks were set aside — with the option of carrying them out later if new funds came in.
The hunt that continued
Applications in 2016With the recalculated budget, the students stepped up the search for the remaining money.
Earlier that year, Realdania and FrederiksbergFonden were the two outstanding answers that were to cover the remaining DKK 11.3m of the original budget.
What a funding pack looked like
The application packThe material for the foundations was not a letter. It was a pack the students built themselves — and followed up with written status reports and joint meetings.
After the joint meeting with the foundations in October 2015, the steering group sent regular status reports on funding, progress, press and budget. The reports were signed on the steering group’s behalf by Christian Refshauge.
Living Learning Lab
Appendix to the applicationsThe ambition reached beyond a sustainable rebuild: the house was to work as a living laboratory, with the building itself as the object of study.
Organisational development
After the rebuildOnce the house was finished, the funding shifted focus from bricks to organisation. The 2020 opening speech thanks Tuborgfondet, Otto Mønsteds Fond and DSEB for the support that made it possible to experiment and fail along the way.