[Location] Hamar, Norway [Type] Museum [Size] 3500 sqm [Status] Proposal
[Collaborators] Alicja Kubicka & Borja Martínez Gómez
Designing at Domkirkeodden is dealing with one of the most magical spots at the Fjord of Mjøsa in Norway. A land where the layers of history appear in front of us to let us understand the deep roots from which Hamar has grown. Thus, this project has been developed with a major concern about tackling the task in a sensitive way. Caring about preserving the current best characteristics and never fighting against them, but enhancing them, has been the core idea of this project.
The building is understood as a gentle gesture in the landscape. A single roof element that dialogues with its environment and provides multiple answers to a diversity of realities on a complex site. And yet, doing so within a pure and free narrative of a single curved surface.
As a new part of the complex, the museum becomes the missing piece that completes the site and makes a whole out of it with great shared spaces and synergies.
The result is an iconic figure building, engaging, that humbly turns towards the Tk Sverre Fehn Museum and the Cathedral, and widely opens to the startling views of TK Fjord. In this sense, the landscape treatment attempts to aggregate itself into the existing path network by employing the same floor language.
There is an inspiring narrative from Sverre Fehn’s legacy. As he put into words “You can only speak with the past by manifesting the present ''. Similarly, very far from tackling the topic by capturing traditional shapes, these buildings offer contemporaneity. We avoid mimesis because we believe in opposing the past against the present: the building is distinguished by its own language and its original expression provides a new value that creates an interesting and fruitful dialogue with its context. A new chapter from our times added to Hamar’s legacy.
