LEÜTHENHAVEN BY HENNING LARSEN ARCHITECTS

The New Leüthenhaven will be a new gathering point in the city, providing the setting for community and informal meetings.

The design of the new office facilities for Trondheim City in Leüthenhaven beautifully connects the building to the new cinema, front square and existing theatre as well as the many other educational and cultural institutions in the area.

The building is designed with a sheathing of Siberian Larch, a natural and completely non-toxic product. The trees sourced for the facade are grown in professionally managed forests, which maintain a careful balance between harvesting and replanting. The robust wood does not need any impregnation, making it an environmentally responsible material choice.

Besides its environmental advantages, Siberian Larch has a high aesthetic value, achieving a delicate silky grey patina as it is exposed to wind and rain; it is able to stand up to the rough and changeable Norwegian climate without the need for continued maintenance.

The facade of the new Leüthenhaven follows a long and characteristic tradition of building wooden houses in Trondheim—a city with the longest continuous line of wooded houses in the Nordic Countries. Since the early 1700s wood houses have dominated the Trondheim cityscape, and in 1841 it was decided that Trondheim should remain a ‘city of wood’.

The new Leüthenhaven is designed in alignment with this vision. The down-sized scale of the office building – as regards height and geometry – relates to the surrounding city. With its human scale, the building meets the city at eye level, and the displaced floors and projections contribute to opening up the building to its context.

Location: Trondheim, Norway 
Architect: Henning LarsenArchitects 
Gross floor area: 39,000 m2 
Year of construction: 2015 
Type of assignment: First prize in competition 
Client: Trondheim Kommune

GLAZED SOFTWARE FACTORY BY HENN

“The central theme for an IT company’s new office building in Karlsruhe is a "Glazed Software Factory". This is not only expressed in the external appearance of the new building but is also continued in the building structure and internal layout.

Open, transparent spatial structures allow a varying range of office types, which combine areas for communication and concentration with one another to provide a bright and diverse working environment for customers and staff.

In terms of urban design, the building takes the elongated plot as its theme. Three interlocking and slightly offset volumes form numerous terraces and accentuate the main entrance on the north side of the site.

So as to ensure a high degree of flexibility, the building is designed to be divided into smaller units and rented, if required. Two main entrances, each with their own foyer, one for the main building user and one for future tenants, mean that building users are clearly separated as they enter the ground floor.

Generous, transparent stairwells and open connecting bridges enable rapid orientation within the building and create a variety of visual relationships for views into and views out of the building. The facade and external appearance of the building are defined by large format fixed window elements, which fan out slightly to the north and give some basic shade from the sun.

The staggered arrangement of the opaque and transparent facade elements lends the building a subtle depth and allow it to change how it looks in the interplay of light and shadow.” Description from the HENN.