Denisa Badoi

Competition: Sola City Hall Design Competition 2015
Program: City Hall
Title: Skjaergarden
Collaborators: Alexandru Barbu, Andrei Tiron, Klaus Darboven-Zapffe, Juan Carlos Toledo Martinez
Brief: This was an open competition for the design of the new city hall of Sola, Norway. The city was a rapidly developing one, the site of the competition being part of the new city center, alongside many other programmed constructions, including a new church and a neighbouring skyscraper. The new building had to communicate with and integrate part of the existing city hall while achieving a functioning and coherente complex. The room programme was extremely detailed with strict square footages and requirements. Besides these, a very sensitive aspect was the relation to the square the city hall was going to open to.
Summary: The final project consisted in the addition of two new volumes connected with one another and with the existing building through a semi-underground level, thus resolving the one floor level difference between the existing building and the square. The three resulting volumes house the three main functions of the city hall: the political, the administrative and public-relations. The concept of the project was to combine the urban aspects and functioning of the building into one solution: the floor connecting the three buildings also serves as an extension of the square. The result is an open and democratic city hall, with the political tower seemingly in the middle of the new square.