Oslo, Norway
European Prize for Architecture laureates Henning Larsen Architects along with Fabel Arkitekter have completed Campus Ås, a new building next to the existing venues of the Veterinary Institute and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, part of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.
“The new veterinary institute at Campus Ås brings together scientists, researchers, practitioners, and students in a kind of complex architectural organism all the while putting Norway on the map as leading within veterinary science,” says Kasper Kyndesen, Design Director for Architecture Norway.
Campus Ås has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Awards Honorable Mention by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Due to the many different users of the new campus, it contains both highly classified laboratories and containment areas with strict requirements for infection control, animal hospitals and clinics, aquariums, and stables as well as areas for teaching, auditoriums, offices, meeting and study facilities, as well as special areas with the latest in veterinary equipment for research and scientific work.
The project is not only considered to be the largest overall construction project in the education sector to date but also the most technically complex construction project ever in Norway. ‘In fact, it is the first campus of its kind.
No building anywhere in the world has the same needs in terms of safety and readiness combined with being an open arena for students and the general public.
It has required innovation, research, and exceptionally demanding work to get the logistics of the building in place,’ says Karoline Igland, Head of the Department in Henning Larsen’s Oslo office, who has worked on the project for more than 10 years.
The process has been characterized by extensive user involvement to achieve functional, efficient, and future-proof solutions.
The design and construction phase stretched over a decade, and technology and new teaching methods will continue to place new demands on the buildings.
The buildings are therefore so robust and flexible that they can adapt to the demands of the future. The risk of infection from dead and sick animals, which must be kept away from healthy animals, students, and researchers at all costs, could easily have resulted in a closed facility that kept the surroundings at arm’s length.
The project is a bridging of gaps: between great and small, hazardous and safe, clinical and human, isolated and connected.
“We asked ourselves how we could avoid Campus Ås becoming a generic research and university factory. At the same time, the new campus was to play together with the existing university from 1901 and we found part of the solution through downscaling and honest use of materials. Rather than trying to join the mass under a single roof, the building’s program distributes it in a number of smaller modules that break down the scale and bring a level of intimacy to the project,” says Igland.
Students and visitors can venture almost all the way into the heart of the building without experiencing the risk intrinsic to the campus’ function as the building is broken into smaller modules that can be individually locked down if needed rather than putting the entire facility on perpetual lockdown. Thus, Campus Ås can take on a public function.
The Veterinary Institute and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine each have their own entrance with a large atrium welcoming them where everyone files through at least twice a day.
The highly sensitive and even hazardous spaces the campus houses, such as infectious disease laboratories and surgical suites, are bound in the center, protected by a permeable barrier of a public program that rings the campus’ exterior.
The new campus sits on a plinth set into the slope of a hill.
Departments rise upwards from the ground level in the form of an extruded E-shape. The campus consists of eight contiguous buildings at different heights, which are connected by a common base as well as bridges.
The eight buildings of a total of 63,000 square meters hold approximately 2400 rooms.
The façade is built up of over 300,000 hand-made bricks in different reddish-brown shades, changing with the seasons from a cool greyish brown in winter to warm orange-red in summer.
The roofs are covered with sedum, which serves several functions. It provides visual life, binds dust, keeps the roof cool in the summer, it takes care of surface water, and it is home to several insect species.
Project: Campus Ås
Architects: Henning Larsen Architects
Associate Architects: Fabel Arkitekter
Client: Statsygg
Photographers: Einar Aslaksen
