• ENTRANCE SHOPPING CENTRE - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    ENTRANCE SHOPPING CENTRE   1/17
  • CULTURAL PLAZA - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    CULTURAL PLAZA   2/17
  • SWIMMING POOL - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    SWIMMING POOL   3/17
  • ULVENGATA - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    ULVENGATA   4/17
  • AERIAL VIEW - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    AERIAL VIEW   5/17
  • SITE - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    SITE   6/17
  • SITUATION TODAY - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    SITUATION TODAY   7/17
  • FUTURE SITUATION - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    FUTURE SITUATION   8/17
  • GROUND LEVEL PLAN - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    GROUND LEVEL PLAN   9/17
  • MODEL BASEMENTS - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    MODEL BASEMENTS   10/17
  • MODEL SHOPPING - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    MODEL SHOPPING   11/17
  • MODEL HOUSING - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    MODEL HOUSING   12/17
  • MODEL CULTURE - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    MODEL CULTURE   13/17
  • MODEL OFFICE - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    MODEL OFFICE   14/17
  • HOUSING - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    HOUSING   15/17
  • HOUSING SITE PLAN - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    HOUSING SITE PLAN   16/17
  • HOUSING TYPICAL PLANS - Økern Centre - SPOL Architects
    HOUSING TYPICAL PLANS   17/17

Økern Centre

Background 
The Økern area is poised to be the next major development area in the Oslo region. An estimated 10 000 persons will live in Økern within the next 12 years. Large investments in tunnels and infrastructure combined with accessibility (regional node), political consolidation through the area plan, and programmatic diversity will secure the tailor-made connections between the existing and new local environment.

At present, the Økern area is a vacuous area of infrastructure and depleted industry forming a divide between residential estates and sporting facilities. The site has the potential to mediate this divide, creating a local centre for an area in transformation. The isolation of the urban fabric paradoxically combined with a hyper-connectivity, its industrial history, the uniqueness of scale and topology on the site, liberates it, demanding a reinvention of program and public space, and provides an opportunity to create a new, fresh, honest identity.

Shopping 
Victor Gruen gave us the ‘climatized’ commercial space, doing away with real nature, detaching us from the outside world, in favour of the fully artificial. John Jerde recaptures the public realm, displacing generic volumes around caricatures of public space, an overwhelming spatial ‘mess’. The mass spectacle of the latter can be understood as an excessive attempt to add complexity (urban) to consumerism.

Both scenarios represent highly controlled environments of amplified experience, a visual and spatial torture, devoid of architecture.

An organizational circular pattern creates routes, through a series of courts, bridges and shops while disintegrating the mall typology. 0pen and disconnected at ground level while continuous and interior at second level.

Culture 
Culture, portrayed as the ideological inverse of shopping, is booming, first and foremost ’commercially’.  It has more often than not become the celebration of a parody. At the same time, culture has a surreptitious influence in small, almost imperceptible constellations, and hybrid forms that appropriate and transform the public realm.

Generating change
These conditions and the ‘optimized’ shopping diagrams that debase architecture provide an exciting forum for rethinking the notion of urban development.

Rather than generate further simulations of the urban spectacle, an oversaturation of the familiar, and the functional, we began by stripping our own illusions and speculate freely on urban ecologies – commercial, culture, living, working, office, entertainment, and leisure: Hotel-conference, conference-multipurpose, multipurpose-cinema, cinema-music school, music school – children’s museum, children’s museum – library, library – park, park – spa, spa – leisure, leisure – sport, sport – market hall, market hall – shopping, shopping – hotel.

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DETAILS

Location

Oslo, Norway

Area

160 000 m2

Programme

Urban regeneration and retail development, including retail, water world, entertainment, cinema, housing and offices

Status

1st prize competition 2007, sketch project 2008

Design

Space Group/ Ghilardi & Hellsten

Partner in Charge

Competition: Adam Kurdahl / Ellen Hellsten, Pre: Gary Bates/Franco Ghilardi

Landscape architec

Arquitectura Agronomia

Team

Space Group: Adam Kurdahl, Gary Bates, Gro Bonesmo, Wenche Andreassen, Kasia Heijerman, José Hernández, Fredrik Kjelman, Yik-To Ko, Naofumi Namba, Jens Noach, Tim Prins / Ghilardi + Hellsten: Franco Ghilardi, Ellen Hellsten, Morten Adamsen, Ida Winge Andersen, Johanne Borthne, Pau Canals, Espen Krogstad, Llatzer Planas, Erik Stenman

Engineering

Arup & Partners London

Visualizations

MIR AS

Category
Urban, Office, Retail, Housing