The apartment towers at Rundeskogen balance views out and views in, and allow the communal ground space right in to the central core.
Rundeskogen. The recessed ground floor creates a sheltered area for communal activities.
The façade is clad with triangular sheets of high-pressure laminate. The sheets are all different, and angled to give a continuously shifting play of light and shadow.
The Rundeskogen apartments are situated at an infrastructural node between three city centres on the west coast of Norway. Single-family houses and small-scale housing projects dominate the region, creating a context that accentuates the height and volume of the project, which is also a result of the requirement to keep a distance to a recently discovered Viking grave on the neighbouring hillside. The three towers contain 113 units, ranging from 60 sq. m. to 140 sq. m., with the highest tower reaching 16 stories. The star-shaped core structure is in concrete, with secondary parts in timber. To minimize the footprint of the three towers and retain the neighbours’ view of the fjord, the first floors have been lifted off the ground, cantilevering from the core, creating covered outdoor spaces at ground level.
Each apartment has an integrated winter garden, with fully insulated glass façades allowing flexible, year-round use. Other environmental features include solar collectors on the roof, heat recovery from grey water and ground source heat pumps. Every apartment buyer received a complementary bike and their own fruit tree in the garden.