Norwegian wood - railway station at Sandvika, Norway

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1995

As well as being an efficient transport interchange for its commuting populace, this impressive new station in an Oslo suburb is a bold and cohesive urban statement.

Sandvika must once have been a charming little country town on the west side of Oslo Fjord, but in the nineteenth century, the railway was driven on an embankment parallel to the shoreline behind the town, cutting it off from its hinterland and ensuring that new suburbs to the west were physically divorced from the centre. During the first boom years of this century, the '60s and '70s, the town's atmosphere was much destroyed by a mess of large object buildings surrounding the middle, which for a while seemed as if it would wither away amid a mass of concrete.

Efforts were made to save the centre's small scale by pedestrianising the main street and preserving at least the facades of the old buildings. Now this initiative has been given much more scope and meaning by Arne Henriksen's new station. His strategy was radical: to abandon the old high level vaguely Dragon-style station buildings (to be given over to new uses), and to make the new one a link through the embankment between the town's two parts.

In so doing, he has been able to create two new town squares. The eastern one (Jernbaneplass) terminates the pedestrian street and has shops on the south side, steps up to the higher level to the east and the possibility of making an arcade with kiosks on the north side under the small cliff on top of which is the car park. The square slopes down westwards towards the embankment, where the station entrance is emphasised by a timber canopy that welcomes you into the shallow vaulted concrete bridge structure that links the two sides of the town at original ground level.

Shops and a cafe flank the entrance and inflect you into the tunnel, which, for all its lack of height, is by no means nasty or oppressive. The concrete is white, and the length of the vault is dramatically punctuated by slots of daylight that slash at right angles across the axis to indicate the presence of the stairs and ramps that rise dramatically to the two island platforms at the upper level. The slots are emphasised by simple structural gymnastics in their roofs, where inverted triangular trusses emphasise the route upwards. At platform level, the roofs swoop gracefully up and then down, like the gentle curve of a dolphin's back breaking the surface of the sea. At the same time (to mix metaphors that sound clumsy in words but are exceedingly elegant in reality) the roofs begin to fan out like flowers before they unfold as protective linear inverted umbrellas over the platforms. The roof structures are carried on two parallel laminated beams supported on cylindrical steel columns.

If, instead of going up to the platforms, you had gone along through the tunnel to the other side of the embankment, you would have come out into the other new square. This is a much more prosaic affair, mostly consisting of the town's bus station, which spreads out under its decent canopies parallel to the railway tracks. The square is partly enclosed by nondescript commercial buildings - but through them, glimpses of the Ronne river can be seized. The experience is an anticlimax, but that is not Henriksen's fault: the place was mostly there to start with. Jernbaneplass is the civic high point of the scheme, but the link between the two sides of the town has given the place new life, both within itself and as the focus of the different transport systems: car, bus, train that unite the low density, high income Norwegian suburban commuting community.