RUTEN is a story about making junk space beautiful, accessible, safe, skateable, fun, green, quiet, collective, and free.

An estimated 10,000 people will live in Økern within the next 12 years. Major investments in tunnels and infrastructure, combined with accessibility (regional node), political consolidation through municipal sub-plans, and programmatic diversity, will ensure tailor-made connections between existing and new local environments.

In 2012, SPACEGROUP completed the refurbishment of the Indigo Textile Factory, constructed between 1896-1899 by Norwegian architects Ove Ekman and Einar Smith.Sitting alongside the Akerselva River in Oslo, the original building had a rich history of uses but was partially destroyed in a fire in the 1980s.The area was historically referred to as ‘Ny York’ (New York) due to its explosive development in the 1860’s.Like its sister city, the area reflects a focus on art, architecture, and design.

Space Group and MVRDV are one of three teams asked to submit a masterplan for the Norwegian town of Madla-Revheim, the main development area outside of Stavanger. Commissioned to develop a model of sustainable growth that treats development principles, transportation systems, and built structures as parts of a whole, the team proposed to concentrate 4,000 housing units on the edge of the 780 acre site.This preserved the heart of the development for open, green space, public programs and athletic facilities.

The Clarion Hotel and Congress redefines the classical atrium hotel into a new, dynamic typology. Unlike the American or Asian hotel atrium with a centralized and vertical, magnificent but one-dimensional void under a glass cover, the void here is given a three-dimensional spatial quality, the result of a rotational logic to optimize the view from each room.

The opening of Filipstad, a post-industrial site connecting Oslo to the world, provides a unique opportunity of starting from scratch - open, interconnected, and intelligent. Inherent in Filipstad is a uniqueness of structure, scale, typology, morphology, program, and artificiality, existing as a raw beauty devoid of the stylistic judgments controlling the rest of the city.

This is the new vision for a fully integrated Scandinavian labor market based on green mobility. In an increasingly globalized economy the demand for efficiency and mobility is increasing. City regions have become the engines in developing the knowledge and information-based community. Bigger and stronger regions are needed to attract and retain people and companies who will create the wealth of the future.

SPACEGROUP with Inside-Outside Landscape Architects and Adams Kara Taylor Structural Engineers provided the vision for a new Rupp Arena Arts and Entertainment District in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Oslo municipality organized a competition for a new firestation in Bjørvika, opening new possibilities for the public facility and for the neighbourhood as a place. The new plot lifts the firestation in the light, to a new visibility and possible encounter with the audience it is supposed to serve. The square in front of the building is designed to be a pleasant public space and, at the same time, to cope with the requirements of emergency vehicles.

The Oxhead project proposes a new, honest vision for architecture motivated by nature and a holistic view for better health, leading to higher productivity, greater engagement, and social awareness. Nourishment, comfort, ergonomics, transparency, adaptiveness are important components of this design ideology.

The site possesses all the critical qualities of the Norwegian landscape: woods, hills, fjord, and uninterrupted views of the horizon. These natural elements provide an ideal backdrop for an interpretation of Norwegian identity as adaptable and fearless, with an aesthetic and ethical sensitivity.

The municipality of Groningen invited Toyo Ito to design a master plan to trigger and redefine the boundaries of the city as they were extending. The architect called the operation ‘Blue Moon Festival,’ and invited four international architects to design a building in the center of Groningen – in our case in the hidden street Achter de Barakken – and one in the future extension of the city, Europapark.

Our design is predicated on the idea that the contemporary hotel is an extension of the city. The Legends Hotel brings together important stories that connect the Latvian people in a space that is open, inclusive, and inspiring.

Oslo Business Region aims to construct a stronger ecosystem for startups and the work fields of the future. They requested an office that provided autonomy and simultaneously belonged in the Mesh coworking community in Tordenskioldsgate, and the city beyond. The space is designed to facilitate new structures for collaboration, communication and has the flexibility to serve needs yet to be defined.

OVERTURE

The Culture House is all too often a conglomeration of disparate programs coupled into an overtly simplistic urban gesture. The public domain within is left to a series of residual cavities within a maze-like organization.

Our strategy is a simple one: allowing Kristiansund Opera and Culture House to function as a single entity but also as a series of smaller, more manageable buildings, crystallizing the ambitions of several strong identities into one collective institution. By combining functions in a rational way based on their common interests and advantages, we establish 3 institutions in one complex.

Distribution of culture and knowledge through an extroverted and highly accessible presence in the city - maximizing friction, exploiting the in-between, strengthening identity - will inspire visitors for learning, play, search and discovery, entertainment and exchange.

The relationship with the existing customs house was formulated with two ambitions: to create a harmony between the ‘new’ and the ‘old, and to avoid strangling the protected customs building. The solution was a slim volume, guided by the most efficient gross-to-net ratio in which all offices are exposed to façade and capable of direct venting. This slim proportion allows fora bonus public courtyard between the buildings, and the extra area is pushed upward, and shaved into a gabled form that allows sunlight into the courtyard. The extra height guarantees spectacular views of the city and fjord.

We are living in ‘exponential’ times. The status quo is constantly redefining itself. The information technological revolution was a quantum leap in the content and performance of the library. Much of what we know today will be outdated tomorrow. The library needs a framework that facilitates simultaneously stability and flux, just-in-time-planning. Too specific and it will be paralyzed by its own inflexibility, too generic and it risks neutrality, losing its connection to place, diminishing its potential for stimulation

In 2009, SPACEGROUP won the competition for Norway’s Federal Aviation Authority (Luftfartsilsynet) as it moved its headquarters from the capital of Oslo to the northern city of Bodø.

Drottninghög, a housing area 3 km northeast of Helsingborg centre – a ‘Million Programme’ area, a program in which Sweden built a million housing units between 1964 and 1974 – was to become a pilot project for sustainability: socially, economically, and environmentally. It was built on quantitative and programmatic ideals based on the notion ‘One size fits all.’

As part of Toyo It’s masterplan for the Blue Moon festival in Groningen, Space Group designed an architectural intervention along a coal wall on a former industrial site. The exhibition included a playground, an exhibition space for the video artist Tiong Ang, and a 200m long café with ice bar on rail tracks.

Helsingborg is one of the last cities in northern Europe to transform its waterfront. This tardiness gives us the virtue of hindsight. We have seen the dockyard developments of Europe look increasingly similar, largely due to a developer-driven market. Competition between cities has ironically only strengthened this trend, a by-product of oppositional theory. A step-change needs to occur with Helsingborg.

Located in the north-east of Oslo, the area of Hasle is experiencing a new wave of development. Drawing upon Hasle’s wealth of historic industrial buildings, the developers of the properties wished to contribute to the creation of a new neighborhood.

SPACEGROUP delivered a design and strategy that embraced the uncertainties of the project and provided a range of possible programs, floorplans, and phasing to counter a number of possible development scenarios.The starting point required a strategy that balanced optimal floor plates, façade-to-floor-area ratios, effective and flexible building volumes, and the proper placement of program typologies to ensure maximum value for stakeholders.