Diplomprosjekt
Høst 2024
Institutt for arkitektur
This project is about a place where architecture students spend the last 2 years of their formal education. A school but also a home where the occupants have a shared ownership and responsibility over the school premises and the surrounding na-ture. 60 students would live together at the school, 15 would come and 15 would go every semester. Teachers would mostly commute from Oslo but the approximately 18 acres big plot would allow the students to build more permanent fixtures for visiting teachers from afar to stay for longer periods at a time.
The site is an old saw mill where the existing building mass has been abandoned for 75 years and has suffered various amounts of decay. It used to be a tresliperi which translates to a sawmill that produces wood pulp. It played a crucial role in the early development of Gjerstad and Risør as communities, that have worked with production of wood products since the beginning of the 17-th century. Documents show that there has been a sawmill at Stifoss since the beginning of this period, in 1893 the sawmill transitioned from producing planks to wood pulp, before it closed in 1949. Fortidminneforeningen and Riksantikvaren managed to remove an approval to demolish the buildings in 2011. The buildings are to be protected through use.
The buildings are monumental brick buildings typical for its time, when the pride of industrialization often was expressed through architecture. They convey a timeline of local masonry knowledge through the three main buildings Sliperiet built in 1893, Tørkeriet (Drying facility) built in 1910 and the power station built in 1939.
The production facilities are in a fitting scale for the program. They stand as monuments showing craft traditions of their time and will function as a contrast to the new built structures. Both in the way of transforming and repairing the existing to a new.
Hauk Haslum
