White Arkitekter has won the Nordic Built Cities competition in the category of Vertical Challenge for the office’s proposal, “The Eyes of Runavik,” located in a village on the Faroe Islands. White Arkitekter has devised five 3-story ring-shaped “houses” that collectively provide 100 units of housing on a steep hillside with views of fjords and surrounding islands. Each building is surrounded by a meadow – ”hagi” – of local vegetation, and each inner courtyard is a cultivated microclimate, or “bøur,” meant to be a more comfortable outdoor space for residents.
“Minimal impact starts with understanding the conditions, accepting them and making the most out of them,” says Morten Vedelsbøl, Creative Director at White Arkitekter in Denmark. “We asked ourselves - how can we create an environment on such a steep slope and in such harsh weather conditions? We decided to transform those challenges into our tools and identity markers.”
With an excess of paths both connecting the buildings and providing access to the adjacent town, cars will fill a subordinate role in the development. And with the efficiency of passive house construction, along with the use of renewable energy – including geothermal heating – long-term occupants will live in net-zero conditions. Each building’s inner courtyard, providing protection from the elements, will allow residents to grow vegetables and other plants that would ordinarily not survive the harsh conditions of the hillside location.
The buildings will use a variety of local materials in their construction including cedar wood with different levels of charring for the exterior facades, non-charred cedar wood for the walls of the building’s interior courtyards, basalt rocks for stonescaping, pathways, as gravel for playgrounds, and sand for sandboxes, moss for green roofs, and sheep’s wool for insulation.
White Arkitekter’s proposal was praised by Nordic Innovation, the Nordic governments, and the Nordic Council of Ministers, for its “iconic character” and the mark it leaves on the community, “creating new thinking in relation to traditional construction in Runavik.” The project does not currently have a construction schedule or expected date for completion.
Architects
Location
Runavik, Faroe IslandsLead Architects
Morten Vedelsbøl (Creative Director) Mikkel Thams Olsen (Architect and Project Manager)Team
Brooke Campbell-Johnston, Charlotte Falstrup (Architect and Sustainability Specialist), Rickard Nygren (Architect and Sustainability Specialist), Viktor Sjöberg, Christoph Duckart, Iben Degn PedersenStructural Engineers
Dipl.-Ing. Florian Kosche ASSustainability Engineers
RambollModular Construction
JNESpace (modular construction)Project Year
2016Photographs
Courtesy of White ArkitekterArea
45000.0 m2
