Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 02/07/2026 23:44:00

A folk high school in a baroque mansion facing Christiansborg is an unlikely combination, and Johan Borups Hojskole has been exactly that since 1926. Founded in 1891 by Johan Borup - a theologian shaped by his uncle Ernst Trier's Vallekilde hojskole and by the radical currents of the modern breakthrough - the school set out to help the big city's "ladies and gentlemen find their way in the modern world", and for over a century it was Copenhagen's only city folk high school. The building at Frederiksholms Kanal 24 is a seven-bay mansion from 1748, an extension of the Barchmann Mansion attributed to Philip de Lange, its facade worked with pilasters in red brick. When Borup bought the property in the 1920s - funded by a national collection started by a farmer - architect Henning Hansen added the assembly hall that quickly became a centre of the city's cultural life: Carl Nielsen wrote music for it, Wilhelm Reich lectured in it, Bertolt Brecht and Tove Ditlevsen passed through, and sculptor Einar Utzon-Frank gave it a vitalist frieze that still crowns the room. Today the school runs a strongly artistic profile - music, writing, theatre, art - as a non-residential day hojskole, and doubles as a culture house whose hall hosts concerts, talks and public events. The location could hardly be more central: across the canal from Christiansborg, next to the National Museum, minutes from the lakes of Slotsholmen's moat. The modern school runs semester-length day courses where students in their twenties typically combine subjects across music, songwriting, theatre, film, literature, visual art and philosophy, without the boarding element of the classic rural hojskole - the city itself serves as campus. That makes the assembly hall's public life a natural extension of the teaching: concerts, debates and cultural evenings open the house to anyone, continuing Borup's original project of general enlightenment for city dwellers into its second century.