Soldagen: In the Interval is shortlisted

Written when the shortlist was published. The competition has since been decided: the scheme took first place.

Soldagen: In the Interval has been shortlisted in GENDO 48: Soldagen. The selected schemes are published in GENDO's Soldagen gallery.

The competition asked for a bathhouse at Vindstad, at the head of Kjerkfjorden in Lofoten. There is no road to the village; everything arrives by ferry from Reine onto a small quay, and the only buildable ground is a narrow shelf of grass between the mountain and the sea. The brief was for the village first and visitors second, in ordinary winter use rather than on the one good day in July.

For around three weeks each December the sun does not rise there at all. Soldagen is the day it clears the mountain again, and it is the thing the proposal is built around. Rather than treating the polar winter as a problem to be lit away, the scheme works with the absence of light: the building closes to the mountain, opens horizontally to the water, and frames the peak across the fjord that catches the sun long before the shelf the village stands on does. You see the light, you walk the copper passages towards it, and eventually you stand in it. The interval between those three is the subject of the building, and the reason for the title.

The research ran before the drawing. We built a panel of AI agents on the competition brief and a library of work on circadian light, thermal comfort and restorative environments, and asked it for hypotheses rather than images. Three came back and stayed: light perceived before it can be reached, spatial depth used to mediate light and temperature, and the landscape framed by how it receives the sun. The circadian assumptions were written down as a set of rules the plans then had to pass — warm light in the morning, bright at midday, blue or barely any in the evening; clothed and communal at midday, individual and quiet after it.

A shortlist is not a result, and we would rather say what it is. It means the scheme is still in, and that the part we care about most, which is that the assumptions were fixed and testable before anything was drawn, was legible to somebody other than us.

Design led by Luke Parkhurst and Michaella Tafalla, with the visualisation and the film by Afterform Studio. The full project, including the concept film and the research, is published as Soldagen: In the Interval, and how we work on entries like this is set out under competition visualisation.