tham & videgard arkitekter

swedish architectural firm tham & videgard arkitekter was founded in 1999 by bolle tham and martin videgard. since then they have gained recognition internationally.

in 2008 they were awarded the kasper salin prize for best building of the year and were also shortlisted for the mies van der rohe award that same year.

a new book detailing their work has been released, displaying 23 of their projects from their first ten years. among them includes the new school of architecture in stockholm, double house, kalmar museum of art and house k.

‘house k’ in stocksund, djursholm, 2005‘house k’ is a thin block with cut-outs for light, double-heights and a roof terrace.author thomas lauri interviewed the duo discussing their architectural style:

your architecture is characterized more by precise apertures than general areas of glazing. how do you view the relationship between indoors and out?

bolle: the architectural historian colin rowe has compared le corbusier’s transparency with walter gropius’s. he argues that le corbusier’s transparency is about layering. he does not always have large openings between indoors and out. but he establishes contact and depth with the openings. gropius’s transparency is more literal:the clearer the glass and the more there is of it, the greater the transparency. our architecture, I think, is more le corbusier than gropius in that respect.

martin: we have designed buildings with large continuous areas of glazing. archipelago house has it, and so does a proposed high rise for sodertalje. but transparency isn’t a general objective with us. we try to find our way back to a foundational idea about architecture. what are the active elements? how does a wall function? where is the boundary between indoors and out? what are the spaces and the interstitial spaces?

bolle: it’s a matter of distinguishing architecture from economics, politics, ideology. architecture is architecture.

martin: take the pantheon, the coliseum or the pyramids, all of which are tremendously strong and spatially articulate buildings. but placed in their political and cultural context they become the symbols of tyrants, dictatorships or a dogmatic church. I once visited a well preserved coliseum in tunisia. I walked round, revelling in the fantastic architecture of it. then I joined a guided tour meant to give a picturesque description of all the historical events: how people had been slaughtered by all the wild beasts, how people had killed each other there. a cultural and political stratum was added. my fascination turned into revulsion. I came to the conclusion that the active elements of architecture are independent of culture.

bolle: relevance is perhaps the most difficult and most important question one must answer today as an architect. we are living in a world where we do not subscribe to any clear ideologies. this being so, one may ask how we can do anything  relevant at all. we cannot agree on a modernist idea as to how we move development forwards. what are the building blocks of architecture? what is perceptually the same to everyone? reconnecting back into our history then becomes important, and so does seeing architecture as an independent language.

‘double house’ in lidingö, 2007

new housing on a forested plot outside of stockholm.

what qualities are you most concerned with?

martin: movement and light are major concerns. but how we use them differently depending on what kind of project it is.

bolle: one distinction you can make is between a small home and a large one. in a small one you have quiet different priorities. either all the rooms are going to be small, or else you adopt a new way of evaluating openness versus enclosure. in a large home you can have both the open and the closed, high and low ceilings and so on. it’s easier to achieve a rich environment.

martin: one way of working out a home is to know that a certain number of people will be living in it. then you avoid speculations about their living habits and concentrate on room connections, movements and sequences. that can end in a solution where the functions of the rooms are undefined. we have the double house in nora with its four large unprogrammed rooms, all of which can be used in many different ways. that confers a certain liberty.

bolle: our villa for the ordos 100 project is probably the furthest we have gone in uncompromisingly developing a spatial idea. there the rooms can be freely programmed. they climb upwards through the tower- like building in a spiral. the only given is certain mechanical services. that’s as far away from an array of functions as you can get.

‘double house’ – drawing

‘söderöra’ – summer house in the stockholm archipelago, 2008

the roof and facades are wrapped in black roofing felt, whilst patio spaces and interior surfaces are made of sawn wood panelling.

söderöra – interior

is it for me? this book is for everyone, its a great illustrative look into the projects the duo have produced over the years, with informative commentary of materials and methods.

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authors: tomas lauri, kieran long & hans ibelings editor: tomas lauri photography: ake e:son lindman. graphic design: nille svensson. publisher: arvinius förlag. binding: hardcover. format: 220 x 240 mm. no. of pages 224. isbn: 9789185689279

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