Fjord Focus

They’re not Snøhetta, Norway’s architects-of-the-moment—and they want you to know it. They’re Jarmund/Vigsnæs, and they fancy themselves an architectural anachronism. They like to make small houses with small budgets. They may not have the profile of Snøhetta, but with a battery of projects all over Norway, including a renovation of the Ministry of Defense and a nice little abode for the crown prince and princess, they’re getting there.

Jarmund/Vigsnæs’s office is on the seventh floor of a gritty 1970s building in one of Oslo’s less lovely corners, replete with standing water on the concrete floors and elevators that more readily summon thoughts of Ceauşescu than King Olaf. The sign on the door is small, the paint is peeling, and on my way over the cabbie double-checked that I knew where I was going. I step inside expecting a respite from the grim aesthetics of the ride up. Instead I walk into the model shop, an impressive morass of cardboard and balsa wood that is more like the unkempt garage of a serial putterer than the foyer of a gang of successful arch-itects. There is no front desk and no one greets me; a couple people look up from their drawings or pause their conversations to inquire who I am and how they might help me. I’m convinced I’ve wandered in by way of the side entrance, somehow bypassed the smiling receptionist, and am now obtrusively milling around outside the bathrooms wondering where the low throb of distant chill-out music is coming from.

Esinar Jarmund, tall, dressed in black, and with a shaved head, catches sight of me and shows me around the cluttered open-plan office. In a refrain that he will echo throughout our hours together, he tells me, "It’s important to show what we are actually doing.  We don’t want to show the polished face of architecture. Though we have some big clients, we don’t want to be corporate architects. We practice an architecture that has rough edges."