Olympic feat - Skarsetlia Olympic Village in Lillehammer, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Anna Maine

The athletes' housing for the Lillehammer winter Olympic Games is an attempt to generate the notion of village in Norway while drawing on the immemorial tradition of Gudbrandsdal farmsteads.

Skarsetlia, the village built for the competitors in the 1994 winter Olympic Games at Lillehammer (some 80 miles north of Oslo) was, like all such places, intended to become a real village when the athletes departed, and, for once, there are hopes that this aim may be realised. The settlement is just to the north of the town, on a west-facing slope, and takes cues for its form from the old farms of Gudbrandsdal, the almost mythical central Norwegian valley in which the river rolls majestically down between great generous curves of the hills on each side, carved by the ice many millions of years ago almost into gentleness. At Lillehammer, the river enters the long and dramatic lake Mjosa, so the place is a key one in the development of the inner part of the country, the more so because the valley sides provide some of the best agricultural land in Norway.

The slopes are still punctuated with old wooden farms (some dating back to the sixteenth century) which conform to a general pattern. They often contained several families and are arranged round courts, two or three to each farm with the buildings for humans in the main court and those for beasts and storage n the looser surrounding ones. The farmsteads are invariably on the sunny side of the valley, and the houses are organised so that they look out over less important buildings to the sun and the fields across the river.

The architects have adapted this series of patterns to the automobile age - and to making villages (traditionally, there are no villages in Norway, nothing between the scale of the small country town and the large farmstead). So Skarsetlia's housing was planned in four linear housing clusters running parallel to the contours with, in the middle, space for a square with a church, kindergarten and housing for the elderly. (This part has been built, but it is by other architects, and not as originally designed.) The long central court of each cluster is the common area, fundamentally green and receiving vehicles only in emergency. Smaller and less enclosed courts act as car parks, just as the animals' courts were subservient to the human one in the old farmsteads.

Cars are partly concealed with stone retaining walls, and similar stones, taken from the site itself, are used to make garden walls providing a measure of private open space. The upper row of dwellings has back gardens as well, and there are open through passages between the blocks. The lower row, and the blocks that terminate the courts, are designed to minimise overlooking from the central space, with stairs, bathrooms and porches concealing the more private rooms from view. In a sense, this is a reinterpretation of the svalgang of traditional farms (the semi-enclosed area that gave a measure of privacy, and shelter from the wind and cold). Important aims of detailed planning have been to ensure that, as well as private open space, all living rooms should have evening sun and views of Mjosa. This has been achieved by exploiting the slope and, frequently, manipulating functions in section - so for instance, living rooms are usually upstairs in the dwelling-strip to the upper side of the court.

The architects were working in response to the Lillehammer Olympics design guide - in many ways an excellent document that called for contemporary work which would respond to tradition without kitsch. In some areas, the guide was quite specific, for instance, it called on the development to be in stone and wood.

Horizontal wood cladding was chosen to emphasise the main volumes of the houses (and call up a memory of traditional log construction), with vertical boarding on services and the occasional touch of traditional colour (Scandinavian dusky blues and reds) to emphasise bay windows and balcony balustrades. The main cladding boards are made very dark - almost black - with traditional tar preservative, but the more tender parts, where you touch the buildings - the doors, windows and handrails - glow in pale golden pine covered with a modern stain varnish. Roofs are covered in grey concrete tiles that recall traditional slate.

So the buildings do have a very strong relationship to the traditional architecture of the magic valley, and doubtless, to some observers, this will lead to accusations of over-sweetness and even kitsch. But the buildings partake of the strength and regional particularity of tradition while being contemporary. For instance, the inward and outward movement of the wall planes, and the relationship of solid to void would have been impossible without modern glass and insulation techniques. A subtle yet robust synthesis of past and present for the future has been achieved.