Far pavilions - pavilions at a university in Tromso, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Anna Maine

Two playful pavilions which are intended to give a sense of place and humour in an otherwise utilitarian university.

Tromso university (which must be the most northerly one in the world) is a worthy but grim place, a product of the 1960s explosion of university education set up on rather factory-like lines to produce urgently as many well-educated people as possible. Undoubtedly it has worked very well, but up to recently it has not had much sense of place or kindliness.

The interventions by Bla Strek are place-making moments in a sea of ordinariness. The new pavilions contrast with the heavy surrounding buildings and are intended to act as punctuation points on the university's long and monotonous south-west/northeast axis. They are sited at a point where the dense grid of the university breaks down in a more-or-less green area that offers views south down to the fjord, and across it to magnificent mountain scenery dominated by the 1341 m Tromsdalstinden.

The lower pavilion has a long curved aluminium-clad wing with sloping walls. This contains offices and studies for graduate students and is joined to a triangular lecture theatre clad in black slate. The apex of this triangle points due north, and the curve reaches out to the fjord while containing a green space.

Across the university's axis is the smaller pavilion, a strip of offices connected to an entrance drum. These are intended to enclose and terminate the green space, with the cylinder acting as a landmark against the hillside.

Materials throughout are simple: wood, aluminium, slate and render. The forms, both overall and in detail, are gently playful, designed to enhance the relationship of the university to the landscape, and they seem almost like works by Paul Klee in the middle of a gallery full of heavy nineteenth-century academic genre pictures.