Aurland Look-out

Via Archdaily

Architect: Todd Saunders & Tommie Wilhelmsen

Location: Aurland, Norway

Client: The Norwegian Highways Department

Technical Advisors: Node AS, Bergen

Contractor: Veidekke AS, Sogndal

Road Engineer: Asplan Viak

Project year: 2005

Photographs: Todd Saunders

The site is above Aurland, a small town in Sogn og Fjordane, one of the larger fjords on the West Coast of Norway. Aurland is three hours drive from Bergen, Norway’s second largest city. We were one of three architecture firms invited to deliver a design proposal for this site. After winning we worked on detail drawings for the project together with Node Engineers, Bergen. The project was built in Fall 2005 and was officially opened in June 2006.
The place has attracted people from all over the world. We called our competition entry «640m over Aurland and 20120 km from Tokyo», keeping in mind the uniqueness of the place in the bigger picture.

The Place - the nature

Nature first and architecture second was the guiding principal when we sat down to design this project. It was immediately obvious to us that in such beautiful surroundings one must make the least possible encroachment in the existing landscape and terrain. The landscape is so fantastic that it is difficult to improve the place, but at the same time very easy to destroy the atmosphere by inserting too many elements into the site. Even though we have chosen an expressive form, the concept is a form of minimalism, in an attempt to conserve and complement the existing nature.

Organization

Today there are many people stopping at this site to enjoy the phenomenal views over the fjords. At times the areas gets filled with cars and tour busses. One of the first things we decided to do was to form a small parking area for 2 buses and 10 cars further up the road to help keep the place pure and not to disturb the look out. The construction is a bridge that one can go out onto, as a structure in the air. The structure is 4 m wide, 30 long, and 9m high out at the very end.

The Horizon and Dramatization

To make the situation even more dramatic it was important for us to create the experience of leaving the mountainside. We wanted people to come out in the air. The construction creates a distinct horizon; a bridge in the open room of this large fjord. It is imperative that the landscape and the vegetation not altered, but are protected so that one came come out from the landscape and experience it from new standpoint.
We have managed to behold all of the large pine trees on the site. This allows us to create an interaction between the structure and nature. One can walk out into the air through the treetops, helping dramatise the experience of nature and the larger landscape room.

via dwell

Norway’s Sognefjord is the longest in the world, stretching some 200 kilometers into the country from the North Atlantic. And though I’ve spent the last couple days darting about the freezing waters on ferries, gawking as passing porpoises and mooning over the hazy vistas—which bear a surprisingly strong resemblance to the gauzy pink paintings of the 19th century Norwegian Romantics like JC Dahl (a previous, if more Viking-enthralled, incarnation of Thomas Kincaid to be sure)—no view has been better than the one from Canadian architect Todd Saunders’ perilously curved lookout about the fjordside town of Aurland.Opened in June 2006 and constructed of linden wood, the lookout echoes the forms of the wharves and piers that project into the fjord itself. But set some 3,000 feet above Aurlandsfjord, a snaking arm of Sognefjord (as high as the water is deep) the long lines and quick, swooping drop—an effect made exhilaratingly real just inches beyond the glass barrier at the edge—provides an altogether less nautical sensation. Viewed from sea level, the lookout suggests a letter of the alphabet or some errant bit of punctuation writ large amidst the trees. Closer inspection reveals a wooden hook, a spar jutting out, supported by two metal piloti and joined, it seems, through an S-curving system of tongues and grooves.

The precipitous descent off the lookout is made all more frightening by the fact that the low, glass guard wall tilts away from the viewers such that they actually have to lean out over the drop to put a hand on it. It also shines the reflections of viewseekers brave enough to venture out to the precipice back toward them, as though the water of the fjord, and not the glass screen, were producing the image.

In addition to the wooden promontory, Saunders put together a small set of restrooms atop a rock wall that feels somewhere between a battlement and a breakwater, just a few yards away. In keeping with the boxy lines of the lookout, the bathrooms are a pair of black cubes that utterly disappear when viewed from a distance, a clever maneuver that makes the bathrooms both understatedly elegant and utterly subordinate to the high-flying architecture just beyond.