Love in a cold climate - Waldorf School in Kristianlyst, Stavanger, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Henry Miles

The first phase of a Steiner school in a Stavanger suburb sets an example of tenderness in human place-making and ecological consciousness in construction.

The Steiner movement has produced some fascinating buildings in West Norway, none more so than the Waldorf school at Kristianlyst, Stavanger. The site is peripheral, among a rather regimented suburb, to which the new building is in dramatic contrast. At first, it seems to be some sort of strange and ancient structure transplanted out of the depth of the primeval forests to its decorous, sanitised late twentieth-century location.

Closer inspection reveals, for instance, that the use of glass must make it a building of the last hundred years or so. Yet it is in a sense timeless: its big gables and natural external materials are reminiscent of various kinds of vernacular architecture and, though there is no sense of copying the past, the building has a reassuring feel that you get from certain kinds of old buildings. This is in part due to the form of the gables, which front the three structural bays of what has been built so far. The gables are formed by creating ridges of paired beams carried on paired columns and bearing back to the spine wall, with valleys of similar paired beams, spanning from the spine to bear on columns that are set forward in plan from the higher columns that carry the ridges. This is extremely cumbersome and complicated to describe in words, but the sketch, model and construction photograph show how the ridges and valleys are connected by hyperbolic paraboloids (a popular structural device of the '60s in which the roofs curve in two planes, while all the bearing members are straight). Because of the movement of the supports in plan, the gables have a curved edge against the sky that moves upwards and inwards from the valleys to the ridges. This gives each bay an anthropomorphic sense of welcome: the immemorial gesture of a mother, with the body as the paired columns supporting the ridge, and the curves of the gables, arms open in greeting. The effect is made stronger because the lower floor is recessed, emphasising the curvature of the arms and the whole figure.(1)

The mothers are plainly wearing some sort of buckskin dress which seems to hang down in strips from the curving arms. This is an expression of a new way of building that has been developed on Norway's west coast in recent years.(2) The area's climate is predominantly cold and wet, and twentieth-century technology has made it possible to make buildings that are virtually hermetically sealed against the elements. But there are many problems with such construction, particularly in houses and buildings, like schools, that are not too much greater than domestic in scale. So to avoid condensation and similar problems, walls that breathe are being evolved. They have an outer permeable layer of rough boarding (in this case the buckskin clothes), then a 'semi-climatised' (or 'half cold') zone (in English terms a cavity), then an inner cladding of timber or board, then the insulation (here injected cellulose fibre) and the inner finish (plasterboard). Because the main force of the elements is dissipated by the outer skin, the inner one can be much more porous than usual, and make an appreciable contribution to air change (semi-permeable building paper is used to prevent excessive filtration of humidity from one side of the wail to the other). The hyperbolic paraboloid roofs are clad with natural slate scales which are small enough to allow for the complex curves, and open enough in nature to permit a construction that breathes in the same way as the walls.

Hand-in-hand with the concern to make walls and roofs breathe was a concern to ensure that they do not exhale poisons (many fungicides, for instance, are poisonous to people as well as fungi). Arbeidsgruppen Hus worked with Norske Skog to evolve approaches to making healthy treatments of wood. Some of the results are developed from tradition, for instance oil or beeswax lacquers which add their scent to the general aroma of pine.

The main entrance to the building is on the upper floor, across a curved wooden bridge. This brings you to a lobby, where a curved void opens down to the hall which is the communal centre of the building, common dining room and so on. Classrooms on the upper floor are delightful, with the pine-clad hyperbolic paraboloid ceilings rising to meet the ridge skylights in a cheerful gesture that fills the spaces with luminance.(3) (Wall windows are comparatively small and mainly intended to offer views.) Downstairs, in the workshops, the ceilings are naturally not so dramatic, but the walls are made of warm pine, and the windows are a good deal bigger, ensuring plenty of daylight.

No space in this school is frightening, authoritarian or bureaucratic. What has been built so far is a start, and quite small in relation to the whole project; but the architects' aim that '"everything" is there, despite "just a little" virtually built' has been realised. It is to be hoped that the bigger scheme will be too.