Helen & Hard designs a coastal shelter in Norway, inspired by Viking boatbuilding traditions

At the northern tip of Rogaland, where the coast of Randaberg faces the North Sea, the rock descends dark and fractured toward the water while the horizon opens onto the Atlantic. It is a landscape that demands character from whoever builds on it. The wind arrives unfiltered, the light changes intensity frequently, and vegetation only develops where the stone allows it. On this same coast, generations of boatbuilders learned, since the Viking Age, to make use of the natural curve between trunk and root to reinforce the ribs of their vessels. On this double legacy —the rigour of the place and the memory of a craft— Helen & Hard has built Cabin Sande, the 112-square-metre cabin that its founders, Siv Helene Stangeland and Reinhard Kropf, built for themselves after twelve years of sketching and refining the project.

The plot, on a sheltered rocky headland in Randaberg, had held a cabin from the 1970s, and planning restrictions required the new building to respect its footprint and height. Within that fixed margin, the studio organised the new building around three conditions of the landscape that at first seemed irreconcilable: the open horizon over the Atlantic, the rocky, rugged descent toward the sea, and the untouched vegetation at the rear of the property. “Our aim was to create an architecture that would connect these different zones of the landscape, while at the same time establishing a strong relationship with the site’s own qualities,” the architects note.

Design and viking tradition

The architectural design is based on eighteen whole spruce trees, extracted with their roots, cleaned, air-dried for eight months and digitally scanned before robotic arms milled the joints that now unite columns and beams directly from the roots. The gesture recovers, almost literally, the Viking boatbuilding tradition. Where shipwrights once sought, in the natural meeting of trunk and root, the piece that strengthened a ship’s hull, Helen & Hard finds the joint that holds up the roof of the house. The result is a timber construction with its load-bearing structure left exposed. Four rows of these tree-like columns open out in a fan shape, and the cantilevered roof beams meet in pairs at the centre, tensioned between columns, forming a horizontal opening of more than nine metres toward the western sea and, at the opposite end, a narrow entrance facing the morning sun and the garden.

Structure and furniture, fused

The interior makes no distinction between structure and furniture. The trunks branch out toward the ceiling and continue into shelves, benches, partitions, door and window frames, the kitchen and the fireplace, so that every built element seems to have grown from the same tree that holds up the house. “We wanted to evoke the experience of standing beneath the canopy of the trees,” the architects explain. “As you move through the space, the rhythmic sequence of the timber columns and the organic character of the structure create a strong sense of shelter and protection”. That sense of shelter coexists with an almost total exposure to the landscape. Continuous glazing wraps around much of the perimeter, so that light, shadow and the changing Atlantic weather enter the house throughout the day and the seasons.

The main space, funnel-shaped in plan, is flanked by two lateral zones: the kitchen on one side, and two work areas on the other, one of them raised half a level above the living room, with the bathroom set beneath it. Although the cabin reads as a single continuous space, these lateral folds introduce depth and a sequence of experiences that avoids the monotony of the open plan. Facing the sea, the large glazed opening —nine and a half metres wide, with no mullion to interrupt the view— is sheltered by a deep roof overhang, which frees the glazed opening of columns. “The weather on the Atlantic coast can be extremely harsh. The deep roof overhang and the arrangement of the timber structure create a sheltered, intimate place that, at the same time, opens toward the sea”.

A house anchored to the place

The relationship with the place is sealed both below and above. A solid plinth, built from the same stone found on the plot, protects the base of the cabin and anchors it to the rocky ground; the roof follows the topography of the terrain and keeps the volume low, almost indistinguishable from the rock that surrounds it. Between the two, the timber structure rises like an organism of its own, visible and legible in each of its eighteen roots, which retain their natural irregularity despite the precision of the robotic milling.

That this should be the house of the studio’s own founders is not an incidental detail. Twelve years of sketching are, for a studio that understands the project as a process of relationships rather than a formal exercise, the time it took for the place, the craft and the material to finish saying what the house ultimately builds. Cabin Sande shelters itself within the landscape of Randaberg, following the same logic by which a wooden hull learned to yield to the sea without breaking.

Project: Cabin Sande.
Location: Randaberg. Noruega.

Architecture: Reinhard Kropf y Siv Helene Stangeland .
Programme: Cabaña
.
Status: Completed.
Area: 112 m².
Team: Helen & Hard; Reinhard Kropf, Siv Helene Stangeland, Njål Undheim, Håvard Auklend .
Photography: Ivar Kvaal y Sindre Ellingsen.

Source: Helen & Hard.

Helen & Hard

In Stavanger, on Norway’s west coast, the landscape imposes its character. A landscape made of rock battered by the Atlantic, fjords that cut through forests of conifers, and a light that changes quickly. It is also a city shaped by the oil industry, with an entrepreneurial culture that pushes people to try, transform and explore new ideas. At that crossing between a demanding nature and a spirit of experimentation, Helen & Hard was born in 1996, the studio founded by Siv Helene Stangeland and Reinhard Kropf that today brings together thirty-two people of very different backgrounds and training, spread between its offices in Stavanger and Oslo.

Relational design

Helen & Hard understands architecture as a process of relationships rather than a formal exercise. They call this method “relational design”, a way of designing in constant dialogue with the social, material and cultural context of each commission, and of letting that dialogue transform the design process itself. Architecture, they maintain, is not conceived first in the mind and then brought into the world, but is built through continuous collaboration with those who will inhabit the building, with the place and with the materials available. This holistic approach leads them to work on the relationships that connect a project with the systems that surround it, from the domestic scale to the urban one.

The first phase of every project consists of inhabiting the place before drawing it. Helen & Hard calls this practice “walk the land”, an extended study of the site and of the situation the project is embedded in, combined with direct listening to clients and future users. From this emerge the possibilities specific to each site, the ones no catalogue of solutions can anticipate. A team of architects accompanies the project from planning through to construction, working with specialist consultants in each discipline.

Wood, a material that transcends construction

In this method, wood occupies a place that transcends construction. For Stangeland and Kropf, a timber structural system is usually the starting point of their architecture. “It’s a sensual material, in which you can see how the forces that shaped its grain have acted,” they explain. “Trees have a life of their own, and you feel a deep respect for the time it has taken them to grow. We work with something alive, an organic material. We have to enter into dialogue with the matter.” That dialogue, they say, translates into calming atmospheres that reduce stress, varying according to the species of tree used.

Specialising in timber construction since 2008, Helen & Hard is counted today among the reference studios of timber architecture, with projects spanning housing, offices, educational centres and cultural facilities, recognised on several occasions for their technical contribution to the field. One of their projects, Ratatosk, is part of the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The transformation of existing buildings occupies an equally central place in their practice. Recovering and reusing buildings and materials is, for Helen & Hard, a way of reducing energy consumption, construction costs and waste generation, but also of working with memory. Weaving the old together with the new makes it possible to create evocative atmospheres, charged with a past that remains active in the spatial experience of whoever inhabits the building.

Attention to the collective

Attention to the collective defines the social chapter of their work. Helen & Hard conceives the design of meeting spaces as a tool against two of the problems they identify in contemporary Scandinavian society: loneliness and segregation. Together with Sissel Leire, they founded Gaining By Sharing, a co-living model that combines private spaces with communal areas shared by a wider community, conceived as an alternative to the conventional housing market, almost always centred on the individual dwelling. Their conviction is that diversity —of ages, backgrounds and professions— strengthens these communities and makes them last longer than those designed for a single resident profile.

The studio extends this relational logic into the field of systemic and parametric design, inspired by the processes of ecology and by the way the components of an ecosystem relate to one another and to their environment. They do not limit themselves to giving tectonic form to space: they seek to establish a generative framework, a meta-space in which architecture can unfold and respond to changing circumstances, with the aim of producing more robust and sustainable results over the long term.

Siv Helene Stangeland, a Norwegian architect and researcher based in Stavanger, trained at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB) and at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), where her points of reference were Sverre Fehn and Christian Norberg-Schulz. Holder of a PhD in creative practice from the Aarhus School of Architecture under the Adapt-r programme, she has taught at AHO, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Chalmers University in Gothenburg, KTH in Stockholm, the University of Sheffield and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

Reinhard Kropf, an Austrian architect and researcher based between Stavanger and Oslo, trained at TU Graz and also at AHO under the tutelage of Sverre Fehn, and has devoted much of his career to the design and construction of timber architecture. He has been a visiting professor at AHO, the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS), Chalmers, the École d’architecture in Paris and Hust University in China, and served as a visiting professor at Kansas State University. Together they founded Helen & Hard in 1996 and, three decades on, continue to champion an architecture built together with those who inhabit it.

Project by Helen & Hard