Folk High School in the projects of students of architecture - Values, Typology, Technology

The folk high school movement was initiated in the mid-19th century in Denmark by N.F.S. Grundtvig and continues to this day, mainly in the Scandinavian countries and Germany. It has been developing also on the Polish territory, since the year 1900. In connection with the program adopted by the Polish government to support folk high schools in the years 2020-2030, this movement will soon be given a significant development stimulus, including financial resources for the expansion of the existing and creation of new educational infrastructure. Meanwhile, the architecture of folk high schools has not yet become a subject of broader scientific reflection. We want this article to initiate research in this area of architectural knowledge. We chose as the method a case study of the project for expansion of the Ecological Folk High School (EFHS) in the village of Grzybów (Mazovian Province, Poland). Based on a compilation and comparison of six student projects carried out in 2021 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology under our direction and in cooperation with representatives of the EFHS, we present general recommendations for the architecture of folk high schools. In the analysis we focus on three key issues: intangible values represented by the folk high school, the architectural typology of its base and environmentally responsible construction technologies.