Wright angles - house in a residential suburb of Oslo, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Penny McGuire

The design of a new house, built entirely of wood, in a residential suburb of Oslo calls upon the traditions of Modernism and the local vernacular.

The two-storey house is in one of the hilly residential suburbs that surround Oslo. It is a long and narrow building with a flanking pavilion and with its stern backed up against a hill. The building descends the slope and drops down a storey, so that from the street you pass straight into the upper level where the living room and kitchen, elevated above the surrounding landscape, have views to the south of the city and fjord. Beneath, the bedrooms and ancillary rooms are disposed around a conservatory which has French windows opening on to the garden.

This airy civilised building is made entirely of pine inside and out; its construction is post and beam with loadbearing walls under spreading hipped roofs. It is clad externally with pine boards treated with pitch and, internally, floors and ceilings are lined with polished pine planks. Walls are simply plastered.

The house has been designed with a Modernist restraint that is all the more interesting for being anchored in vernacular structural tradition. Frank Lloyd Wright appears to have had some modest hand in the design - you have only to think for instance of the Barton House (Buffalo 1903). There are Wrightian resonances in the way the building fits the ground, in the pavilion format and oversailing roofs, and in the sense of movement and rhythm - expressed in long horizontal cladding lines and bands of beading, and in the pattern of windows, emphatically defined and running freely around corners at the upper level.

The interior is sumptuous in its polished simplicity, a tribute to craftsmanship. Throughout the house, there is the pleasure of light, natural or artificial, gilding the wooden surfaces and diffused through doors of banded glass. To increase their volumes, the upper rooms have been given steep pitched ceilings underneath the floating roof, and the living room in particular with its big fireplace has something of the character of a medieval hall. As an antidote to Norway's frequently grey weather, this interior must be enlivening as well as harmonious.

There are to be two more structures in the same style. One pavilion will be a garage, the other will be a summer pavilion for a dining room beside the terrace.