By Rob Wilson
Above the Arctic Circle, where the winters are long and dark, people’s relationship to light changes and thus architecture needs to adapt. uncube’s Rob Wilson spoke to Kjetil Trædal Thorsen from the Norwegian practice Snøhetta about diurnal rhythms in the far north and how his practice’s buildings respond to the lingering blue hour.
As a practice based in Norway, with its annual extremes of near-endless days and nights, do you think that at Snøhetta you are particularly concerned with questions of darkness and light?
Yes, it is something we have always been interested in. Recently the lighting company Zumtobel asked us to design their annual report, and we used it as a research document, turning it into a project called “Living the Northern Light” to think about architecture in general within the Arctic Circle. We wanted to learn something from doing it that we could put back into our architectural work.
Do you identify a particular sensibility that comes from long, dark winters?
Well, there are some presumptions about this. For instance, the idea that you get more depressed as it gets darker and closer to winter is spoken of as a basic truth.
»Above the Arctic Circle, with its long dark winters, our relationship to light changes and thus architecture needs to adapt«
But new research questions this, and the reason for what is happening might be a combination of things: the cold, the windiness or the wetness, not necessarily just the light.
But the lack of light does have some effect?
Technically every place on earth experiences the same amount of direct daylight. But interestingly, the horizontality of the sun’s position above the Arctic Circle creates a long blue hour due to reflection of the sun’s light when it is just below the horizon, throwing further indirect daylight onto the earth’s surface the further north or south you get. In effect this means that you could claim, through indirect reflection at least, that north of the Arctic Circle you have more daylight throughout the year than at the Equator. It’s as if the specific daylight conditions are bridging their own deficiency.
During the first seven months of life we develop our colour vision, which is influenced by lighting conditions. In a study that Bruno Laeng and others conducted, it was found that people born north of the Arctic Circle develop a stronger tendency, or sensitivity, towards blue and purple. So say you are born there at the end of October, until May it’s almost always dark. This means you never get outside to experience daylight during the time that you are developing your lifetime sensitivity to colour. This raises interesting questions about the influence of artificial indoor light and how such differences might influence our daily decision-making.
I like the idea of benign dark spaces in the home – of storage and store-cupboards – it harks back to Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics of Space”.
Yes, like the cellar that needs to be dark in order to protect the potatoes, an important part of the Norwegian diet, so that they do not start growing. This is a very positive attribution and use of dark space – preventing things that should not happen from happening. But perhaps this also relates back to a particular Nordic sensibility; one reason we’re so structured is that we have to plan for a long winter. The whole preparation and planning sequence needs to be more thorough closer to the poles, where you can’t just eat fruit from trees. Perhaps it influences our organising of everyday life.
How do the specific changing conditions of light near the Polar Circle affect the design of architecture?
The light conditions change throughout the year. Nearer the Equator you can establish a much easier rhythm, and in designing a house there you have a predictable day and night situation. But when you have slow transitions throughout the year, you have to adapt to the light conditions in a more complex manner – through using a building’s shape, for example.
In summer, when there is the midnight sun, you need to shade the lower windows during the day towards the north to avoid glare from the low sun, and open up fully to the south. In the transitions of autumn and spring, you have to be able to open up on every side – including skylights above – so that you get as much light as you can from the sky. And during the winter, when there’s no light anyway, it doesn’t really matter!
»Outdoor spaces in Norway were traditionally lit through the windows of buildings: from inside to outside«
But then the house itself becomes a marker in the winter, a glow in the dark.
Outdoor spaces in Norway were traditionally purposefully lit through the windows of buildings: from inside to outside. Snøhetta have used this idea in our own architecture: for instance, in our opera house in Oslo, where the exterior roof is lit from inside the lobby. It’s similar to what Alvar Aalto when he used skylights.
Another quality connected with darkness is danger: the feeling that it’s hostile.
Yes, which often connects to the fear of crime. The idea is that crime is always committed in the dark, but that’s just not true – it’s much harder to shoot someone when it’s completely dark! These reverse misunderstandings of danger only occur when you start lighting exterior spaces for security.
What happens is that you create enormous insecurity in the border zone of that light, so once you move beyond it, you suffer double anxiety.
Contemporary architecture could be seen as a constant battle, using expanses of glazing or electricity to even out the rhythms of natural light.
And with artificial light there tends to be this divide between “task lighting” and “general lighting”, but there are contradictions in all such terms. A new difference is now developing between lighting from a source and lighting from a surface. This has developed mainly from carrying your laptop or mobile phone around with you as a light source. One of the first apps to come out was the one converting your mobile into a torch, which represents the individualisation of light, carried close to your body, from one space to another. It’s a bit like it was before electricity was introduced, when you carried a moveable lamp around with you from room to room.
So the lit surface is reduced to only that which you need to get information from, and the rest of the space around you can remain dark – reducing energy use too.
Of course the development that’s coming is manipulated surfaces replacing source lighting generally: screen surfaces that provide you with all the light that you need, so we may move away from task lighting again and back to just lighting up the space generally, not that part which individuals need at any particular time.
Perhaps you will artificially be able to prolong the day too, if you imagine that daylight through a window could be gradually replaced by the growing glow of the OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) from a screen.
How does your thinking on these issues shape projects at Snøhetta?
It’s in smaller projects that issues of light are touched on most clearly; it becomes more obvious if the essentials are boiled down. The Tverrfjellhytta Reindeer Pavilion, for example, has no artificial lighting inside it, and the interior is only lit from one source: the fire. Internally, its curved wooden walls are designed not only in relation to how you sit towards the view, but also to catching the light and warmth coming from the fireplace, maximising it so it penetrates the space. And from the outside at night, the light beams out from the big window that's orientated towards the mountains.
Other projects that we’re working on are a series of what we call keyless structures: public access buildings without keys that you can walk into 24 hours a day without surveillance cameras annoying you all the time.
Kjetil Trædal Thorsen (*1958) is an architect and founding partner of Snøhetta, an international architecture, landscape architecture, interior design and brand design office. He was born in Norway, and spent several years in Germany and England, before studying architecture in Graz, Austria. He then worked in the offices of Espen Tharaldsen (Arbeidsgruppen Hus) in Bergen (1982–1983), Ralph Erskine in Stockholm (1983–1984) and David Sandved in Haugesund (1985), before co-founding Snøhetta in 1987.
Thorsen has led Snøhetta teams designing the museum for the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London designed with Olafur Eliasson, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina library in Alexandria, Egypt, and the Oslo Opera House in Oslo, Norway. He was a founder of Norway’s architecture gallery, Galleri Rom in 1986.
Since 2004, Kjetil Trædal Thorsen has been a professor at the Institute for Experimental Studies in Architecture of the University of Innsbruck.
In some of these we’re experimenting with light as they are disconnected from electricity, like our outdoor exhibition spaces at Kvik in Sweden – or cabins in the mountains where you can shelter if you get lost, like the one we designed in the mountain area of Åkrafjorden by Etne, on the west coast of Norway…
Are you seeing these buildings as prototypes for less tailored but bigger solutions for those large chunks of the world still off-grid?
I was hoping by starting this research that maybe – hopefully in my lifetime – we will be able to typologise this for testing houses off-grid, not only by introducing electricity through off-grid means but also by just playing with the specific light conditions particular to these places. But we are not cavemen – we’re interested in the future! I
PRODUCT GROUP
MANUFACTURER
New and existing Tumblr users can connect with uncube and share our visual diary.
Uncube is brandnew and wants to look good.
For best performance please update your browser.
Mozilla Firefox,
Internet Explorer 10 (or higher),
Safari,
Chrome,
Opera