Petter Dass Museum

By Peter MacKeith

Until his death in 1707, the parson poet Petter Dass wrote prolifically from the medieval church of the small shoreline farming community of Alstahaug—hard by the western slopes of Norway’s dramatic Seven Sisters mountain range. Celebrating the sacred virtues of what inhabitants refer to as “the kingdom of the thousand isles,” Dass paid reverent homage to the people and landscape of northern Norway in his most famous work, Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland):

It seems that, far out on the edge of the earth
Old nature has found its good way to give birth
To rare and splendid abundance.

Three hundred years later, Dass’s life and work are themselves dramatically celebrated and exhibited in Snøhetta’s Petter Dass Museum in Alstahaug. Addressing the growing tourist and visitor needs of the existing church—now one of only seven such preserved medieval churches in Norway—and an adjacent 18th-century parsonage, the new building’s linear volume is boldly set within an excavated cleft of the site’s dominant granite ridge; its curving, winglike roof form projects out from the ridge to overlook the fjord waters beyond.

Contemporary Norway is a nation still acutely conscious of its natural beauty, and of the relationships between the natural environment and its cultural identity. The strong topography of the near and distant landscape, the presence of the historic church, as well as the animating character of the museum program, posed challenging, intriguing questions of siting, construction, and representation.

An exceptional poet and considered Norway’s greatest writer of his time, Dass has also become the subject of folklore, remembered now as a person who outwitted the devil. “Certainly the history and character of Petter Dass led the initial discussions of how to approach the project,” says Snøhetta partner Craig Dykers, AIA. “The choice of connecting the building to the sea through the nearby ridge was in part a means of releasing the site to the unrestrained character of the waters beyond. The integration of the building with the land allows the site of the past—the historic church—to merge with the undefined nature of the future as found in the sea.” Snøhetta reveals the spiritual and religious aspect of this Christian priest in the building’s geometry. The vertical spire of the medieval church, in combination with the horizontal axiality of the museum, implies a cruciform geometry when perceived together.

The crux of that cross-shaped geometry is in fact the forecourt of the new, 14,500-square-foot building, so that museum visitors are immediately confronted with the complementary forms upon arrival. Yet the boldness of the design’s singular siting gesture unbalances the relationship; the contained volume is set between an artificial cleft created by 230-foot-long, wire-cut rock walls 50 feet apart (the excavation technique is a common one in Norwegian construction, owing to the rugged character of the country’s terrain). The building itself is 37 feet wide within the clearance, providing for 6 ½-foot-wide passages on either side—a walkway through the ridge, and a stairway to its summit, where a monument to Petter Dass is erected.

The granite walls frame the glass-enclosed ground floor, which is level with that of the medieval church. There is no disputing the hovering, dynamic quality of the museum’s curving form; its zinc-sheathed, steel-framed upper level cantilevers out 23 feet at front and back, arching upward to a height of 32 feet above grade, in resonance with the curvature of ridge terrain, but clearly rising above it.

Inside, the museum program is transparently organized and presented in both plan and section. A simple three-tier staircase indicates circulation and services organized against the southern wall, leaving the bulk of the rectangular volume for public spaces. A reception and gift-shop area just past the entry doors leads to a glass-enclosed, red-seated auditorium, and through to the café (and outdoor terrace beyond). A polished-and-coated concrete floor throughout further reinforces spatial continuity. The permanent exhibitions of Petter Dass’s life, writing, and times, also designed by Snøhetta, occupy the entirety of the oak-floored second level, with a partial third level of glazed office and library spaces stacked above, just under the curvature of the roof. The massing of the program toward the center of the plan balances the cantilever at both ends of the building. Detailing throughout is spare and minimal, although much attention has been paid to the necessities of exterior wall construction, owing to the harshness of the northern climate.

Snøhetta’s designs always possess a strong formal, even gestural quality, at any scale—as seen in Oslo, at the new National Opera House [record, August 2008, page 84]—and here in Alstahaug. Yet, each of the firm’s designs contains a hidden, “telltale” moment of experience. The positioning of the museum volume in the cleft granite ridge has produced two compressed passages of movement, between the museum’s reflective outer walls and the grained, mossed granite surfaces. These are visceral places, highly tactile, and compelling in their focus through to the shoreline or churchyard and spire, or ascending to the ridgeline and its views over the fjord. On repeated visits over time, Dykers has experienced further subtleties in relation to larger environmental effects: “The building has taken on many more nuances with respect to its reaction to climate. I have been surprised at how differently the building feels when it is wet, covered with snow, or set under direct sunlight. While we imagined some of this, the intensity of these changes was unexpected.” In Petter Dass’s words, a “rare and splendid abundance” indeed.

Nezu Museum

Updating Tradition: For a previously overlooked museum, Kengo Kuma creates a new home that connects to its garden setting and the big city beyond.

By Naomi R. Pollock, AIA

With a new name, a new logo, and a new building, the Nezu Museum has transformed itself from a staid cultural institution into Tokyo’s latest “it” destination. Despite a world-class collection of Asian antiquities and a central location in the city’s fashionable Omotesando district, the old museum (the Nezu Institute of Fine Arts) and its traditional garden kept a fairly low profile. But thanks to the new building and landscape design by Kengo Kuma, the Nezu is impossible to miss. Topped with a dramatic tile roof, Kuma’s building stands apart from its commercial surroundings. Yet it greets pedestrians warmly with a live bamboo wall symbolizing the elegant blend of architecture and nature inside.

“One unique aspect of Japanese culture is the deep connection between buildings and gardens,” says Kuma. “I want to go back to that tradition.” This approach marked a departure from the Nezu’s previous home. Adjacent yet closed off from its carefully tended grounds, the privately owned museum encompassed a concrete exhibition hall plus four plaster-covered storehouses. The original concrete building opened in 1955 (with additions in 1964 and 1990), but the storage structures and garden date to the era before World War II when the Nezu family estate occupied the property. When roof leaks and poor climate control threatened the priceless artworks in the storehouses, the museum decided to replace them with a new exhibition structure and convert the old museum into offices and a state-of–the-art archive for the 7,000-piece collection.

Removing the storehouses enabled Kuma to reposition the museum’s entrance more prominently—to the end of Omotesando’s famous, boutique-lined street (instead of a sequestered approach from Kotto Dori). A 148-foot-long walkway leads to the building’s main door, in the process taking visitors away from the buzz of the city. Inside, an intimate reception area adjoins an expansive sculpture hall overlooking the 161,459-square-foot garden. From the hall, visitors can either go outside or enter the six galleries: three on the ground floor and three (plus a lounge) on the second floor—all accessed by a glass- and-steel stair in the middle of the room. While a café occupies its own Kuma-designed garden pavilion, a shop sits near the museum entrance.

A second stair descends below grade to a 70-seat lecture room, and a hidden corridor behind the galleries connects to the old wing.

Though the new Nezu has more gallery space, its administrators’ primary goal was to improve the quality of the exhibition area—in terms of both conservation and display. Because of their fragility, most of the artifacts make only brief appearances in the galleries, each one designated for a different medium, such as decorative arts, tea ceremony objects, or calligraphy. Sequestered behind solid, steel-reinforced-concrete walls, the galleries are lined with built-in storage and cloth-padded cases where humidity and lighting conditions can be closely monitored. While the rooms are intentionally spare and subdued, the cases are equipped with LED and halogen fixtures that spotlight individual treasures without exposing them to harmful heat.

Because earthquakes are a major concern in Japan, stone figures in the sculpture hall stand on pedestals concealing metal springs that absorb seismic tremors. Though the objects are not light sensitive, Kuma carefully coordinated daylight and electrical fixtures to best present the pieces against the backdrop of the newly configured garden. Fanning out from the building, the garden presents a spacious, tree-ringed lawn cut by a path leading to the café. From here, walkways connect to the existing grounds laid out by the Nezu family’s master gardener. Uniting inside and out, a glass wall fronts the sculpture hall. While glass fins securing the wall minimize view-blocking window sashes, oblong, solid-steel columns measuring 4-by-12 inches seem to effortlessly support ceiling beams that enable the room’s 49-foot clear span. Soaring to 49 feet at its apex, the angled ceiling echoes the building’s pitched roof.

The museum’s most distinctive feature—its roof—is a direct quotation from Japanese history but rendered more abstractly, befitting a contemporary museum in an urban setting. While its traditional image ties the museum’s contents and container together, the pitched form, says Kuma, distinguishes the Nezu from the unpopular, boxlike public buildings around the country that do not blend with the Japanese environment. “A pitched roof harmonizes the ground and architecture,” he explains. Charcoal-colored ceramic tiles clad the entire roof surface, and their uniform texture accentuates the angled planes. Instead of ending with the typical, decorative flourish at the ridge or gutter, the matte surfaces terminate in tapered, sharp-edged eaves made of 0.13-inch-thick sheets of industrial grade steel—the same material covering the museum’s exterior walls.

Supported by 9-foot-long, cantilevered beams, the eaves shield the front walkway but submerge it in semidarkness. “People usually expect lighter spaces in public buildings,” comments Kuma. “But this darkness is necessary to separate [the museum] from Omotesando.” Black sandstone pavers compound this shadowy effect, while bamboo walls mitigate it. (Two rows of live bamboo plants buffer the building from the street, and split stalks adorn the facade, forging connections with both the garden and the interior.)

Inside the museum, Kuma used many of the same materials, including sandstone flooring and, especially, bamboo. Complementing the delicate tea utensils on display, exquisitely detailed bamboo panels cover walls and ceilings. In addition, the architect crafted versatile, L-shaped benches from both bamboo and wood salvaged from the old museum’s storehouses.

Today, those benches are one of the few reminders of the collection’s original home— a tranquil place where railway magnate Nezu Kaichiro I, the museum’s founder, first assembled and began sharing his treasures with the public. Drawing a wide audience that spans all ages and nationalities, the Nezu Museum now connects to its founder’s dream of honoring Japan’s artworks and brings the institution into the 21st century. Kuma’s design serves as a physical and metaphorical hinge linking old and new, inside and out, high-tech and traditional. And it does so in such a graceful way that it seems almost inevitable.

Sustainable Mountain Hut by Studio Monte Rosa, Monte Rosa, Switzerland

By Steven Spier

The new Monte Rosa hut sits on Switzerland’s second highest Alpine peak, with impressive views of the neighbouring Matterhorn. Building in such a remote and inhospitable landscape presented huge challenges, not least the difficulties of transporting materials to the site

Since all the components of the prefabricated structure had to be transported to 2,795m above sea level by helicopter, minimizing the weight and number of trips became a key design factor. Despite being dwarfed and daunted by its surroundings, like some kind of survival pod in a lunar landscape, the hut actually sleeps 150 people. Wrapped in a glittering skin of aluminium, the new building is a far cry from Monte Rosa’s original rustic Berghütte which dated from 1895.

The project to replace it was devised by Meinhard Eberle of the ETH-Z’s architecture school and led by Andrea Deplazes. He made it a student project and founded the Studio Monte Rosa. At the end of the first semester, six of ten designs were chosen to be developed further and were passed on to new students in the next semester. These were eventually narrowed down to two options. The students also built the hut

Alpine tourism was a 19th-century invention, giving rise to the familiar infrastructure of railways and grand hotels that transformed once remote villages into resorts. Those who wanted a more rugged alpine experience could hike between mountain huts (Berghütten), where they could expect a sleeping bunk, a warm meal and little more.

The challenges of building an alpine hut in such remote places and harsh environments are as huge now as they were then.

It takes a few days to acclimatise to the thinness of the air above 2,500m and temperature extremes, even within a single day, can be considerable. Construction can only take place during a very short alpine summer and getting materials to the site is difficult - in the 19th century, building supplies were laboriously transported on the back of either mule or man.

Yet the term alpine hut is a misnomer; they are often good-sized buildings. The original hut at Monte Rosa, Switzerland’s highest peak, sits at 2,795m and could sleep 150 (tightly packed) people. With its stunning views of the Matterhorn, it is one of the busiest of Switzerland’s 153 Berghütten, but to get there from Zermatt still involves a trip by cog railway followed by a three-hour hike across two glaciers and a scramble up a rock face. A simple timber construction on a stone base, it has outhouses perched on a mountain edge and no running water except for a trough outside. Built in 1895 and extended and rebuilt over the years, it desperately needed to be replaced.

Coincidentally, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH-Z) was looking for a way to celebrate its upcoming 150th anniversary in 2005. Project director of the anniversary programme, Professor Meinrad Eberle, proposed designing a sustainable mountain hut, and in 2003 Andrea Deplazes, professor of architecture and construction and partner in Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, was appointed to lead the project. With the Swiss Alpine Club (SAC), which administers Switzerland’s Berghütten, they began looking for a challenging site that was also well visited, and eventually settled on Monte Rosa.

Deplazes made it a student project and formed Studio Monte Rosa. In view of the extreme challenges of the construction’s physics and logistics, specialists from other departments of the ETH-Z - the School of Engineering and Architecture at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, and specialists in economics and management - were brought on board. Assistant professor Marcel Baumgartner became the project architect and the team looked at climate data and use cycles, with the aim of building a hut that was self-sufficient in energy, water and waste.

An obvious starting point was a dense building with minimal surface area. A sphere delivers the smallest surface area relative to volume, so the new Monte Rosa hut tapers a spherical form over five storeys in response to its plan, the constraints of prefabricated timber construction, and the need to minimise openings while maximising solar gain.

Internally, the form is centrifugally segmented like an orange, with 50 separate compartments. The central core is a compact hallway and landing from which the sleeping quarters fan out. Vertical circulation wraps up and along the external wall. The huge volume follows the arc of the sun, bringing in passive heat, pulling air through and providing stunning views. Yet it is also designed to be a social and dramatic space; the depth of the structure allows you to sit in the facade and the main grand staircase is painted glistening gold.

With a huge rectilinear plane covered in photovoltaic panels angled at precisely 66.2º to maximise solar gain, the south facade is a purely rational form for generating power. Surplus energy is stored in battery banks and waste water from showers and toilets is filtered and reused. Solid waste is minimised and removed, not dumped down the hill, as was the case at the old hut. A cistern was blasted out of the mountain to store sufficient glacier meltwater for all the hut’s needs.

Some 15 per cent of the 6.5 million Swiss franc budget (approximately £4 million) was set aside for the transportation of building materials by helicopter.

Minimising weight and the number of trips thus became a major design consideration, as did the short summer which limited building time. The timber structure was prefabricated, with the optimal assembly sequence computer modelled. On site, it was packed with insulation and the exterior clad with an aluminium wind-and-rain screen, chosen for durability and lightness.

Within the concrete foundations, a steel undercarriage shaped like a wagon wheel isolates the building from the ground so it does not affect the permafrost. The kitchen is at the core of the main floor, with seating areas fanning out towards the Matterhorn. Its primary structure is a series of exposed timber trusses radiating out from the centre, with built-in timber benches and tables.

The effect is both rustic and sophisticated but, between the architects and the SAC, achieving that balance was not straightforward, proving sustainability is as much a cultural as a technical issue. The concept of a mountain hut was in fact unhelpful, suggesting a certain aesthetic and level of comfort; the old hut was dark, looked like an alpine chalet and offered primitive facilities. The facade, interior and improved amenities of the new building were a challenge to mountaineers’ expectations, so the architects had to balance modern architecture with traditional perceptions.

You could ask whether it would have been more sustainable not to build a new hut at all - but tourism is practically the Alps’ sole industry, and the huts are vital to help sustain local economies. The new Monte Rosa hut shows how ecologically, culturally and economically sustainable architecture can be achieved in
an extreme environment