Angelic conversations - Carmelite convent in Tromso, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Edith Ericsson

In Norway's far north, amid a harsh landscape and unforgiving climate, Lund & Slaatto's convent for nuns of the reclusive Carmelite order embodies a pragmatic yet poetic sensibility.

Carmelite nuns belong to one of the most introverted and reclusive monastic orders within the Catholic Church. Communication with the outside world is strictly limited and daily life is ordered by sustained periods of contemplation and meditation. The sisters own nothing and are totally self-sufficient. The new Carmelite convent in Tromse, far above the Arctic Circle, has the distinction of being the world's most northerly outpost of the order. Designed by Lund & Slaatto, the building occupies a wooded site on the south-west slope of the Kvaloya mountains, whose dizzying, meringue-like peaks dominate the harshly beautiful landscape. The convent houses 25 nuns (each nun has a small, private cell), together with spaces for other associated liturgical and practical functions. Within the compass of the modest two-storey building, there is also a vegetable garden, hen house and churchyard. Self-sufficiency is a paramount concern.

Appropriately, the plan resembles a dumpy angel with its wings outspread, a configuration that both encloses and defines the convent's presence in the landscape. At the heart of the modestly scaled complex is the gently bulging womb like space of the main chapel. Two wings radiate out from this symbolic core. Cells, recreation and work rooms are grouped around a west-facing courtyard, the regular, incremental rhythm of the cells expressed on the dominant west elevation. At the tip of each wing are the larger communal spaces, such as the dining hall, library and recreation rooms. Corridors and hallways are arranged as a circuit for the purposes of meditation. Visitors and guests are accommodated in the semi-public link between focal chapel and its outstretched wings.

The intense spiritual seclusion and physical isolation of convent life (10 hours of prayer and liturgy daily, no newspapers, radio, television or mirrors), coupled with Tromso's unforgiving sub-Arctic climate, reinforced the need to bring light into the building. Large windows on the west elevation as well as rooflights in the distinctly Kahnian vaults, capture and diffuse the strong Nordic daylight, introducing a seasonally changing pattern of views and light that plays on the walls of corridors, cells and recreation rooms. In the chapel, light is filtered through narrow slivers of side openings; these may be embellished with coloured glass at some stage in the future. This is the only potential suggestion of ornament; materials are generally left unadorned. The raw grey concrete of the undulating vaults is set against the more delicate nuances of pink and ochre coloured bricks. Inside light-coloured stone combines with white ceramic tiles and bleached timber. The vaulted structure recalls an earlier Lund & Slaatto church at Lillestrom (AR June 1990), in which the building was treated as a series of additive units, pierced by slots of light, yet it also imparted a powerful sense of the numinous. Here, in the middle of Tromso's snow-covered wastes, there is an equally pragmatic yet poetic sensibility at work.