Berlin - Los Angeles
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L.A.R.S. - europan 8
Bergen, Norway - second prize
L.A.R.S. formulates a new town center for the suburb Åsane. Instead of importing a model of urbanity the strategy is to pull on-hand conditions and continuities across the site, let them work with, against and next to each other. Their sudden encounters generate a site-specific mix and edition of urbanity. The project combines the seemingly contradictory potentials of landscape and highway. The existing mall is extended across the road to form the base for a multi-programmatic stacking. Landscape connections are wrapped around the resulting big volumes and a view- or walk-related housing topology is on hand. On a building level individual programmatic interests are played out generating accidental gaps and courtyard like holes that allow for unpredicted encounters. While working with the self-concerned logics of suburbia, L.A.R.S. engenders a field where to meet, stumble upon, run into and come across an emerging diversity.