EXPERIMENTAL HOUSING IN Svartlamon
Open House Oslo
Norwegian. English subtitles available.
The experimental houses at Svartlamon are located in an urban ecological research area in Trondheim, Norway. Here five families have built their own row houses with a very low budget, relying on a lot of reuse, environmentally friendly materials and their own manual labour and creativity, in a scheme developed by the young architectural practice Nøysom.
Place: Svartlamon, Trondheim
Client: Svartlamoen boligstiftelse
Architect: Nøysom Architects
Team: Trygve Ohren, Haakon Haanes og Cathrine Johansen Haanes
Carpenter: Arnleiv Overgård
Area: 5 houses x 60 m² + common house ca. 50 m2
Total cost: 3.000.000 NOK
Status: Planning 2013-2015, building 2015-2017
Self builders: Torfinn Borkhus, Siri Gjære, Guro Sletnes, John Strandskog, Per Kristian Nygård, Line Anda Dalmar, Markus Lantto, Johanna Gullberg og Iacob Sømme.
The project traces its roots back to 2013, when Nøysom Architects decided to initiate a self-build project at an unused “experimental site” at Svartlamon. During the next two years, the architects continued to develop the concept with participation from the residents at Svartlamon, and later the self-builders themselves, before the actual building started in 2015. Before New Year 2018, after five years of planning and building, everyone had moved in.
The concept is a versatile architectural framework of five compact row houses connected with a common house, that the self-builders would be able to adapt to their own needs and preferences using what they could find of discarded or reused materials and components. The main design criteria were that the houses would be able to be built easily without specialists (except the plumbing and electricity), that they would fit into the existing structure of lowrise wooden buildings at Svartlamon, and that they would have a low ecological footprint.
This film was made possible with support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Norway, and is a part of a series of six short films, all about social, environmental and economic sustainability.