Oil and water - Statoil A/S's research center in Rotvoll, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Julia Gleeson

This major research centre for the Norwegian national oil company humanises a large building programme by integrating the complex with a magnificent landscape.

Statoil is the state-owned Norwegian oil company, an immensely successful and lively refutation of those fanatics who believe that state ownership has no place in a modern economy. The group research centre is at Rotvoll, a little to the east of Trondheim, in gentle pastoral country that gained its patterns of cultivation in the eighteenth century. Statoil needed a sizable volume of building and it was determined to have views of the sea from which its wealth flows. Like any other big oil company, it was prepared to use its power to get what it wanted, and a relatively poor local authority was persuaded to sell land and ignore the local plan to get an important new employment centre which would provide a generous flow of local taxes. The result has plainly been something of a problem to insert into the landscape.

Two different kinds of basic accommodation were called for: first, laboratories which could undertake experiments of many different scales (and degrees of danger, some experiments involve working with highly explosive gases), and second, more or less conventional offices in which computerised research can be carried on, as well as training and administration. The two types have been rigorously kept apart, largely because one is semi-industrial and rather dangerous while the other could be arranged to offer users a view over the magnificent fjord landscape to the north.

The office accommodation has almost all been arranged in spokes that radiate over a southwest to north arc from a hub that contains the main entrance, reception area and common facilities. The masterplan shows four spokes and a shorter one, like a right hand seen palm upwards; in the event, the left (west) most finger has not been built and may form a future extension if the company needs it. The fingers are four storeys high and start off wide from the hub, being constrained halfway along their lengths to the width of a central corridor with rooms of various sizes on each side. This bald description sounds rather daunting, but in fact, this is another example of the excellent Scandinavian model, the combi-office, in which each individual has a private area which has access to a group space that itself opens into the public realm. This lattice of human and spatial relationships at the Staroil headquarters is not nearly as clear as it is for instance at the SAS headquarters in Stockholm by Niels Torp (AR March 1989). None the less, there are some good features about the planning of the fingers. For instance corridors always end in a common space that has a generous view over the fjord and sends a prospect of light and hope down the whole length, and, in most places, there is a generous mix of functions, spaces and movements of light along the length of the fingers which greatly ameliorates the basically institutional form of planning.

You reach the finger corridors from the rim of the palm, the centre of which is hollow, forming a semi-circular arrival court that is defined by a glass wall and made welcoming by the swoop of a pitched roof carried on branch-like steel struts that top the double-height order of concrete columns which articulates the glass semicircle. Inside, the curve is a high, light space, topped with a timber roof supported at the back on cylindrical steel columns. The brick ends of the spokes penetrate the hub (when you are looking at the building in reality and not in plan, the metaphor changes). The spoke ends are connected by steel galleries cantilevered from the columns. The detailing of this side of the foyer appears in its simplicity and directness to be an abstraction and taming of the great North Sea rigs from which the company makes its money. The volume is powerful, and has perhaps been rightly criticised for being too much so.(1) Certainly the 400 employees on the site do not need such a grand space. But this is a place to which many visitors come, and, as a showpiece building for a major oil company goes, it is modest in its detailing which almost clangs as you go upstairs.

The best space in the complex is the canteen which opens generously off the foyer between the first and second fingers. Here a curved terraced space covered by a saw-toothed glass roof offers ravishing panoramic views of the fjord. The galleries fly overhead, looking out and down into the interior of the glass web.(2) [Sadly we were not able to obtain pictures of this area, but readers may be able to understand some of its effect from the drawings. ED]

Externally, it must be admitted that the various parts do not sit entirely happily together. The basic diagram is so powerful that, seen distantly from most angles, there appears to be, if not unity, a degree of genial conversation between elements. Closer up, this is plainly not entirely the case. The laboratory block, pinched between the thumb and first finger of the hand, is necessarily separate and somewhat different in nature from the rest of the complex. The main problem is of the relation of the spokes to the hub. Perhaps the analogue raises too greatly expectations of elegant fit, but the unresolved way in which the brick elements crash into the sloping outer curve of glass is clumsy, and this uncomfortableness is echoed elsewhere in the detailing.