Thor Heyerdahl School in Norway inaugurated.
schmidt hammer lassen architects' largest school project to date has been completed in Norway. The project is one of Norway's Schools for the Future, enhancing cross disciplinary learning.
The Thor Heyerdahl School of Advanced and Further Education in Larvik, Norway was inaugurated today (Friday). The 33,400 m2 new school, designed by the Danish architects schmidt hammer lassen, is the largest new school in Norway. Schmidt hammer lassen won the international competition for the school including a 4000 spectator sports arena in 2005. One year later, the company won the competition for a 25,000 m2 school building of City of Westminster College.
The new school is pointing to the future as a social and educational experiment. The students of the technical educations are deliberately mixed with college students aspiring for later university degrees. Thus, schmidt hammer lassen have made Norwegian thoughts on educational reform concrete.
Schoolchildren are normally divided after secondary school, but in Larvik they will be kept together and blended socially and across educations in an open learning environment. The blend of social classes and the mutual inspiration the students of various trades give each other has the purpose of enhancing equality in society.
"We have chosen to rethink and challenge the traditional boundaries surrounding school buildings. We wanted to create an architectonic base for a well functioning student environment and increased cross disciplinary activity", said associate partner Kristian Ahlmark, design architect on the school project.
The building is laid out to place the buzzling social activity in the axis of the house with informal meeting spaces. As you move further away from the axis, the spaces turn into half-open niches and the furthest areas of the wings are calm and secluded to allow concentrated studying.
The teaching takes place in the terraced wings. Parts of the classrooms have glass walls to maintain openness and contact to the common areas. The workshops for the technical educations are also in open contact with the rest of the school. The architecture is a compact vertically oriented structure with a characteristic and dynamic form of four axes. The central structure consists of an open quadratic deck. This deck has deep incisions that give the building a dynamic form and enable daylight to seep into the furthest corners of the building. The deck above is identical but twisted 180 degrees around the central axis of the building. Hence, at series of single and double height areas are created providing visual contact from one floor to the next. The shifting decks create external terraces in a direct flow from the classrooms.
The sports arena has room for 4000 spectators. It will be used by the school for cultural and sports lessons during the day and serve as the home arena for the local handball club as well as venue for many other sports and cultural events during the evenings.
A timeless cultural landmark, schmidt hammer lassen architects' sharp monolith in black marble with its tilting angles on the port of Copenhagen is attracting many tourists and citizens for its architecture. However, the library is also hailed for the new values it set out to introduce: The library as an open, democratic institution embracing not only the study of books but opening up to many other media and cultural activities. 
The Royal Library was ahead of its time and the first in Denmark to introduce such groundbreaking values to a previously dusty institution. Many cities around the world are erecting impressive new libraries all adding ever more functions to the institution and not even calling it a library anymore.
The digitalization of media will have an even more profound impact on the libraries in the future while still leaving room for the traditional book. In collaboration with the pioneering public library in Aarhus on the mainland of Denmark, schmidt hammer lassen architects are now developing just such a library for the future called Urban Mediaspace. 
The company won the international competition for the 30.000 m2 library earlier this year. The architecture of the building with its open levels and visual contact to the outside world will embrace all new media, experiment with new formats and new ways of learning, networking and socializing. At the same time its function as a 24/7 pivot of the city’s cultural life is secured through informal meeting places and venues for cultural events. 
The range of the practice library work extends from The Royal Library in Copenhagen, to the above mentioned Urban Mediaspace, to the design of public community libraries in Sweden, Denmark and the UK. This diversity has developed the practice’s understanding of the issues pertinent to contemporary library and learning space design; how to design for the future at a time where technology is moving so rapidly; how to mix and balance a variety of activities from studying to socialising to storing books; how to design sustainably, in the widest possible sense.
