Competition description translated from Norwegian:
ECOBOX: 130x120x100
The Village Building
- or how small can you think big?
The Royal family is still close to the Norwegian people. This also applies to their way of living. The west side of Oslo is the most popular housing area; central, with short distances to all kinds of facilities, to the sea, boat and beach life, to the forest and in walking distant from cultural and less cultural dissipations. At the same time, many people “have to” be able to walk around their houses. These qualities together draw the lines of the Norwegian living-ideal, which could be the King's estate at Bygdøy, with the King’s pasture house as a holiday home. The disadvantage with this is that the Kings property is insuperable expensive for the people, and it is already occupied.
Despite the myth; is it possible that the architect is not ambitious enough? What if there is something wrong with the countryside, that the communities do not have a contemporary physical shape. In the competition program, illustrations of concrete is not displayed once, on the other hand almost 20 tactual surfaces in wood and some asphalt.
In a time with huge changes and possibilities; who wants old clothing, walk in sad shoes, or live in out of date communities? Reason does not lay the foundation for the holiday palace of Røkke, for today cars – SUVs –weighing over two tonnes, accelerating as a racing car and consuming as a lorry, or for the continuous flights to Mallorca, shopping in New York, decoration, or the interest for TV chefs. Behind lies a wish for adventures; but could architecture in Norway be both spectacular and wanted?
About 7000 people move per year only to Oslo city; Blilyst therefore raises a question that exceeds regions, to a national level. In this experiment the potential to establish similar qualities, as in the King's royal palace in the fairytales, to a manageable prize, for most people are examined. It happens in the districts. The challenge is to turn a hillbilly form of living, where everybody’s freedom becomes nobody’s freedom, to a bobbling urban context in contrast with nature. The Village Building addresses this, through an infrastructural concrete skeleton, that can contain about 5000 people.
The Village Building combines countryside values with an urban melting pot, in an iconographic diagram, in its smallest and most concentrated form.
The Village Building is a critic and a development of Le Corbusier`s anti-urban Unitè d`Habitation. A new interpretation of the typical square country courtyard contributes to this. Where the starting point was to establish houses after WW2, the problem now is how to establish attractive space in the countryside.
The Village Building consists of a rectangular plateau, the “country courtyard”, an urban public-square-sandwich over a mechanical main entrance area, encircled by vertical built fabric, where a ramp cuts trough as a residential street. Public functions bobbles through the centre.
The location of the Village Building characterizes the program of the diagram; at regional nodes the public-square-sandwich is given more floors, in agricultural areas the area for machinery will get greater heights and volume, in the mountains the holiday developments will go further down from the top of the ramp. A certain degree of expansion and reprogramming is included.
A tripartite DIAGRAM reflects a typical Norwegian valley:
The public space plateau, perforated in three stories, lies above the main entrance and combine people and functions in the Village Building.
The plateau is a public arena for sports, games and festivals, with a swimming pool, cafés and other things ala a traditional Piazza. Don’t forget the hairdressers.
The public space sandwich contain a shopping mall with stores and post office; important for internet shopping. Show rooms and a catwalk exist for fashion shows and “home parties” of different kinds.
In the outskirts of the plateau fronting the terrain, a riding centre with stables and other domestic animals can be kept; over the terrain and the main entrance; public functions such as homes for the elderly and ill, health center, town hall and police station.
Underneath the plateau there is a production area for industrial agriculture, work shops and machinery, connected to the distribution system; parking, gas station, taxi stand, buss station, plus a lane for cruisers and other car related youth culture.
Up trough the public space, public functions arise up against a sloping elevator shaft, ending as a windmill, organizing the community in the whole cube.
Holes in the plateau create light and playground for a school and a kindergarten. Closest to the plateau the assembly hall hovers; used by the municipality, as a cinema, for conferences, lectures, religious gatherings and funerals; according to a rental system coordinated by the tourist center with an observatory on top.
In between are bobbles/spheres for library and county college.
The ramp binds the Village
Building together; this green street is also the tribune of the city, as
when there
is a football match on the square. The inhabitants can park their cars beside
the villas and get to the cabins and observatory; vehicles with a permit
transport goods and services. Yearly festivals take place on the ramp; sledging
downwards and sprint upwards, as a competition between the neighborhoods; ended
with a common dinner at the plateau. The ramp is the basis for the 11 different
units, with internal circulation in the accouplements.
Businesses are established in
the lower part between the ramp and the plateau, where there is less light than
further up. Working space based on internet is prepared for here, in addition
to space for local working possibilities that are generated.
The living areas are organized
with their own green space, for small and big apartments, as a kind of atrium
row- and terrace houses, and villas. Different size, design, materials and
qualities secures mixed and diverse neighborhoods.
Recreational facilities ends the
Village Building as a pasture
landscape. A camping site and parking space for foreign recreational vehicles
is established here, together with a hotel and mountain inn. The world’s
highest artificial route for mountain climbers is located along the façade. If
they reach the highest viewpoint, they can through themselves out in a
paraglide.
The CUBE:
First the Village Building will constitute a national district political experiment, a deep-ecological research project. A typical Norwegian valley is twisted to become a complete joint community, trough a one and a half kilometre bridge and elevators like the towers of Nordlandsbrua, financed by national oil. The prototype, a typological mutation of the blocks of Tveita and Geilo, morphologically of the high rise Plaza hotel in Oslo, the Norway Post building and Bislett stadium; could later be adapted for all the Norwegian municipalities and create a new layer of national settlement.
A reconfiguration of planning strategies is a premise, public infrastructure are developed as a whole, compact, as a ramp. The buildings are planned and drawn by different architects and the whole developed and built simultaneously, by a handful of investors.
The Village Building is a stranger to the city, but can to it advantage be localised in picturesque surroundings, because of its autonomy also outside regulated settlement zones, as part of protected areas, in connection to cultivated landscapes. It presuppose a priority of a site, for example localised in South-Trøndelag, with daily bus connections to Trondheim, less than two ours from the airport at Værnes.
The Village Building gives the inhabitants views free from neighbours and curtains. The government guarantees no further development within a three-kilometre radius, in a 30-year timeframe. Nearby there are green areas, golf, ski tows and recreation with hunting and fishing, but also agriculture and allotment gardens with individual lots.
The multifunctionality and concentration of the Village Building saves energy in itself, and gives a built in energy-, water- and drainage-system. The form of the cube (130x120x100 meters) makes it possible to close the structure with climatic buffers in cold areas; in the winter and at night. Sun and wind conditions and possible wind tunnels are explored as energy sources. The experimental and ecological features are focused on through research, conferences and a county college with library as the centre of distance teaching.
The Village Building could be self sufficient through its own agricultural production; “Slow Food”, but also a provider for import and export of goods and services, knowledge production, and will constitute a tourist attraction in itself.
A diagram; the farm, a country courtyard and a pasture, the Village Building establishes a modern Soria Moria.
a-g-e-s, by Mathias Harang
