Table manner

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997

The Norwegian State Railway system has a distinguished record of commissioning good modern buildings, both for stations and more utilitarian purposes. The big lorry garage it has built at Rolvsoy on the east side of the Oslo Fjord, some 40 or 50 kilometres from the capital, is needed to facilitate exchange of cargo between rail and road. It looms over its more puny and mundane neighhours, almost as a church dominates its village, or a nineteenth-century mill its town.

In plan, it is an oval with its southern end cut off, like a boiled egg waiting to be eaten. In volume, it is a rectangular frame surrounded by a curved shell. The frame has very simple strong galvanised rolled steel sections bolted together and tied against distortion by galvanised steel rods. The timber shell is of sheer rebated boarding supported on laminated timber ribs that rise the whole height of the space to the plastic glazed rooflights that cover the geometry between rectangle and curve. These throw a wonderful graded light down the walls, allowing plenty of illumination for the people who drive and work on the vehicles.

Resolution of the two geometries was plainly not easy but has been accomplished with finesse. The steel frame is fundamentally like a big table with timber joists spanning to support the table top in the short dimension of the rectangle. From the tops of the laminated posts, what are in effect short paired rafters span to the beams which form the sides of the table and tie the inner and outer structures together. The rafters support thin purlins which in turn carry the perimeter plastic roofing. All very cheap and simple stuff, but very well handled with great attention to economical and elegant joints.

The space of the building is perhaps its greatest surprise, but the front doors are pretty impressive too. Big galvanised frames extend from the table to each side of the entrance; their thin diagonal bracing delicately patterns the sky. These frames hold up the doors when they are slid out to open the building up, so transforming it into a quite different kind of object to the closed ovoid. As a final refinement, the outer frames of the doors themselves are made from galvanised steel channels with a vertical central bar formed from a universal beam. The planks of the skin of the doors are very gently bent over the central member to be restrained on the back edges of the channels. The gesture cannot have cost very much, but it adds greatly to the feeling of grace and welcome which the whole building radiates. Would that other organisations were prepared to be patrons of utilitarian buildings with this kind of decency.