The Wedge

This final site of the Barcode row was a narrow wedge between the building row and the main westbound route into Oslo. Was it too narrow and ineffective to be worth developing?

«What if we flip these challenges into advantages? Barcode had become a business district for large corporations. What if we do the opposite and make buildings that suit the undergrowth of smaller enterprises based around the city? All of these enterprises that supplement the large corporations, but nobody thinks about.»

Project leader of Barcode and founding partner of A-lab Geir Haaversen.

With this in mind, Haaversen and the rest of the A-lab team went on a field trip to New York, where one day, they took a break in The Meatpacking District.

«As I sat there gazing at the classic brownstones with exterior steel staircases, the kind we have seen in countless movies, the design of the last building suddenly became obvious to me. Why not build Oslo’s take on a brownstone to conclude the Barcode row?» Geir Haaversen says.

If The Wedge had been filled with the necessary facilities, it would not have been more than meeting rooms and emergency exits. An unexpected twist was to place the meeting rooms and the emergency exits on the outside.

The advantage of being on the end of the row was that the eastern façade had a view of the Middelalderparken park. The meeting rooms were placed on the exterior, almost as if they had grown out of the wall. The famous New York style steel staircases function as emergency exits and balconies. Not only did these design measure free up space for the office areas, they also gave the building its iconic look. When arriving in Oslo from the east, The Wedge is the first building you see. The meeting rooms jut out from the façade, signaling that this is an active and happening city.

Brick was a deliberate choice of façade material. Not only does it contrast the rest of Barcode, it also establishes a link to earlier settlements in the Middelalderparken park.

Bracing was an essential element in the construction of a 42.5 meter tall, 82 meter long building where the main building occupies 41 meters and screening walls around a giant gas tank takes up the other 41. Because it is on the end of the row, facing Middelalderparken, the building would be subject to tough weather conditions, occasionally with strong winds from the north or the south.

«In order to give a narrow building the greatest level of interior flexibility, finding a column free design was crucial. The vertical elements of the loading-bearing system had to be integrated into insulated exterior walls,» architect Carsten Klinge from A-lab, who was the technical director of the project, says.

In Norway, frameworks are built either using wooden studs, which is most commonplace, or steel studs. The choice fell on steel studs filled with incombustible rock wool, drywall sheeting and exterior air barrier sheets.

«The main load-bearing system is a combination of steel framework in the exterior wall frame, with prefabricated hollow core slabs that separate the floors. The steel structural work leads the strong gusts of wind through the lower floors and into the basic structure. Internal elevator shafts and transversal steel structural work contributes further to the bracing,» Klinge explains.

The meeting rooms measure 3 by 3.5 meters, have a surface area of around 10 m2 and are steel frame structures cantilevered on the main load-bearing system. To minimize weight, corrugated steel plates were chosen for the floor system.

To create the illusion of boxes shooting out of the façade, there was a desire for brickwork on the underside of the boxes. Bricks are laid on top of each other, glued together with mortar. This means that bricks cannot be laid horizontally into thin air. The solution was to make prefabricated ceiling slabs with half-sized bricks on concrete.

«It was important to keep the weight of the brick ceiling as low as possible while keeping the strength to withstand suction from the fjord winds. For the ceiling, we used an exceptionally thin brick slab that was screwed to a wooden lath,» says Peter Madsen, technical director of Danish company Randers, who produced the prefabricated brick elements.

Technically, that raised another issue. When a window is flush with a brick wall on insulated walls, a thermal bridge between the window and the uninsulated brick occurs, and this weak point must be blocked. Insulation barriers were put in to reduce the heat loss.

From a distance, the framework behind several of the large windows is visible. The same solution was used for the north wall, where a vertical window strip shoots upwards with the framework zigzagging inside it.

«It was a technical necessity that ended up creating a striking design effect,» Haaversen chuckles, remembering how much work they put in this small detail, which had been developed in collaboration with an engineering office for building physics.

A final greeting

The Wedge is standing there tall and bold, greeting everyone arriving the capital from the east. Its simplified design never ceases to impress.

«For me these meeting boxes are not just an additional generated area, they are the crown of the building! The crown of barcode! The cantilevered boxes, which cannot be overlooked by passers-by.» architect Esdichan Yesdin stresses.