Marine Elf - Societe National Elf Aquitaine S.A.'s marine research center in Randaberg, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Julian Hertzsprung

This research complex for Elf shows how Norway's oil wealth can be used to continue the ancient traditions of brick building in the landscape, while exploring some of the most up-to-date management ideas.

Norway's great oil wealth was a surprise to a country that had always thought of itself as rather austere: a fine-honed culture living on the edge of fell and fjord. It attracted a great deal of development to the south-west coast, much of it mundane at best. But there is a new generation of oil-related buildings, of which the French company Elf's marine research centre (Akvamiljo) is one of the most outstanding examples.

It is in Randaberg, to the north of Stavanger the oil capital of the country. Here is an ancient and strange promontory patterned by the activities of ancient peoples and surrounded on three sides by the sea. The building is set on a north-east sloping site that offers views of the fjord, its islands and distant mountains, and of Tugenes, the tip of the promontory, with its strange parallel dry-stone walls which impose a powerful pattern on the meagre grassland.

Accommodation has been divided into two parts. There is a rectangular three-storey laboratory block set on the lower part of the site. Above is the two-storey canteen and conference block, which is curved to take advantage of the panoramic views. The two parts are linked by a generous enclosed ramp which starts from the entrance lobby at the upper level of the laboratory block and rises up the hill to the base of the canteen.

Several kinds of environment have been created. The lower levels of the laboratory block are almost industrial, with a big double-height research hall that has means of conducting to the research rigs pure fjord water at constant temperature drawn from 80 metres down. The uppermost level of this block is more conventional, with offices and laboratories with the usual long, serviced benches. Here too is the foyer and reception area, which is entered through a brick arcade and has a jolly blue mural directing you to the stairs that lead down to the lower floors. But if you decide instead to go up to the other block, you turn right up the ramp.

This is one of the most impressive spaces in the building. Broad and generous, its slope is paved with dark grey slates. The rhythm of the arcade through which you passed into the foyer of the lab block is carried up the hill, at first blind, then becoming glazed in the upper part of the slope; it is echoed on the right-hand side by a totally glazed arcade. Light flooding in from both sides at the top of the slope draws you upwards, but the main sensation is of peace and gentleness, of the possibility of progressing through the savage landscape safely contained. Its parallels to the medieval cloister are obvious, and intentional, for the best contemporary management thinking on research centre planning stresses the importance of the promenade in which casual conversations can happen and fortuitous ideas emerge by happenstance. So the ramp is both a route and a series of places in which to linger to chat or to contemplate nature.

A stair greets you across the little foyer at the top of the ramp. Its dog-leg leads to the splendid upper space: a simple curved volume, continuously glazed along the front and sides to make the sea and the far-off mountains breathtakingly part of the place. It is a memorable climax to the route.

The timber mullions of the continuous window stretch down outside over the brick base which contains the lower storey, articulating and giving scale to its curve. But the brickwork, which is used as cladding over the in-situ concrete structure, gives the building another, more finely detailed scale. It is very well built, using bricks that vary in colour from plum to dark pink. They are set with very wide mortar joints, gently bag-rubbed to give coherence to the mass, without detracting from the detailed pattern: the process gives a degree of tectonic nobility to stretcher-bond, something that most of us thought impossible. Alas the excellent bricks are no more, the last batches made by the excellent local brickworks at Sandnes were used here, and another link has been broken in the excellent Norwegian/Danish tradition of fine and eloquent brickwork that dates back to the churches and castles of the Middle Ages. We must hope that the architects are able to find new supplies to develop ideas and skills they have evolved at Randaberg.