Norra Tornen | OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture

How does one make a project from ingredients one is usually keen to avoid? What repertoire should be invoked when (modern) architecture’s most instant reflexes: asymmetry, prismatic volumes and smooth exteriors instantly prove impossible?

The two inherited building envelopes, each a kind of ‘crescendo’ composition of different heights – neither slab nor tower – prohibit the unfolding of an uncompromised typology. Conversely, the opted program: apartments with an emphasis on large outdoor spaces, prevents too literal a translation of the envelopes into architectural form.

The chosen approach could be characterised as a kind of ‘Freudian flight forward’: a passionate embrace of the inevitable in order to conquer and overcome one’s initial fears. The prescribed building envelope is adopted as a given; its initial vertical segmentation is complemented by a second, horizontal segmentation that gives the buildings’ exterior a single, homogeneous treatment: a rough skin, formed through an alternating pattern of withdrawn outdoor spaces and protruding living rooms.

The manipulation of the initial building envelopes, however slight, somehow radically transforms their initial premise.

An implied architecture of monumentality gives way to an articulation of domesticity. An intended urban gesture originally subject to a singular interpretation: “gate to the city”, triggers multiple readings. A once formalist structure comes to house apartments that are surprisingly informal… one could even say humanist.