All photos – White Arkitekter

Kastrup swimming pier

Sweden’s White Arkitekter and its latest Naturum centre, Vittenriket, standing on southern town, Kristianstad’s wetlands

You might think that White Arkitekter’s name derives from the practice’s Swedish roots in the frozen, snowy north. Actually, the studio was founded by an English architect, Sidney White, in Gothenburg in 1951. Coming to prominence in the social building wave of the country’s mid-sixties ‘Million Homes’ grand project, White have grown to be one of the largest Swedish firms with about 500 staff in 11 practices, with Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmo running major offices of up to 150 each. Looking to expand abroad, in the past three years White have won competitions in Britain, with the redesign of the destroyed Southend Pier in 2009 and the ecobuild House 4 Life competition in Salford, Manchester this year, an unusual turn given both the recession and the most recent Scandinavian surge of UK building by Danish architects is receding rapidly with the opening of most of the Danes remaining projects this year.

In fact, the Southend Pier project is being led by Fredrik Pettersson, out of White’s only non-Swedish office in Copenhagen, set up with the explicit aim of competing with the Danes – since the latter have been winning many big Swedish commissions – on their own turf. Southend will complete a triad of stilt buildings all standing over water rather than dry land. The first of these, the Kastrup bathing shelter, reaches out into the North Copenhagen coastline near Oresund, a curving protected spiral made from wood standing on concrete piles, unusual in brick loving Denmark. To Pettersson’s surprise when completed in 2004/5, Kastrup drew attention from architecture magazines internationally.

The second of these stilt projects is the recent and significantly more ambitious Vattenriket Naturum in Kristianstad, in Sweden’s southern Scane region. As the most recent in the country’s Naturvardsvaket or Environmental Protection Agency’s initiative to provide a network of well-designed visitor centres for the Swedish Naturums, or national reserves found all through the country, Kristianstad is also the latest in a family of Naturum centres that have involved White Arkitekter. Begun in 1983, the programme was welcomed by the Swedish architectural community for showing a new Governmental engagement in supporting contemporary architecture, a move which drew comparisons with Norway’s tourist related De-Tour roads art-architecture initative. Although a few other practices have been involved – including Wingardh’s current Lake Takern Naturum, due to open next year – as Mark Issit writes in White Green: Ten Projects in the great outdoors, White Arkitekter have been “the Naturum builder par excellence” with other offices seeming like ‘guest appearances.’ Kristianstad Naturum may also be one of the last since taking office in 2006 the Conservative Government have cut the programme’s central funding.

The 100 million S Krone (approx £10 million) wetland centre is a two-part design, with a 325 m long low cycle and walkway bridge over reed-beds before curving round to join the main Naturum building sitting amidst the easterly flowing river Helge. A shorter bridge connects to a car park on the buildings far side, completing an outdoor amphitheatre space in front of the main entrance. Pettersson, working with a team from White’s Malmo office developed the winning design out of a ‘nest in the reeds,’ design concept, a protected central space in the heart of the wetlands site, with the bridge walkways for visitors to experience the water, reeds, and birdlife close up. As with Kastrup, Kristianstad is a study in timber, although Pettersson says the continuity of material wasn’t part of any larger design plan. Where Kristianstad draws from the swimming baths is in the more complex iteration of Kastrup’s curving, sheltering spiral form. Kristianstad’s core three level building, consisting of offices and ground floor information area, and a two-floor restaurant dramatically cantilevers out towards the town-side of the Naturum. With external viewing areas, plus an expansive 30m glazed window interior views out onto the reed-beds. A forest of vertical slats adds to the buildings south-side drama, while standing back from the open atrium-like entrance space. A smaller administration and office block pulls the protective nesting theme further round the entrance, while counterpointing and adding to the rhythmic interplay of the buildings contrasting volumes.

Finnforest Kerto has been used throughout both buildings, supplemented by glulam on some façade walls where sun shading limited using the unprotected and untreated Kerto. Thermowood has been used for cladding, and the walkways decking is Bitus Linax impegnated Nordic Pine. The primary sustainability research focus was in materials for the load bearing and underwater piling. Different materials combinations: concrete base with concrete piles or concrete with steel, as well as timber, were researched for their efficiency, while generally Pettersson points out that with the further underside face exposed to varying temperatures the Naturum is difficult to work with in terms of energy efficiency. A building integrated PV array of 10kWp capacity has been installed on the top floor roof terrace with a predicted annual output of 9000kWh/annum and provides rain protection and solar shading. The buildings total demand for energy for heating, cooling, hot water, lighting etc is calculated to be under 100kWh/m2/annum. It is also planned that heating will soon be drawn from Kristianstad’s town-wide distributed community heating system.

Despite the showcase character of the build – it is by far the largest of the Naturums to date, a point not lost on Sweden’s architectural press – there was no research tie-in, surprising given Southern Sweden is a centre of timber research with Vaxjo University’s internationally respected timber engineering department less than two hours away. Still Naturum Vattenrikat is a stylish piece of contemporary timber architecture, all the more interesting in a country where there is still, again for outsiders, surprisingly, a dearth of ambitious timber architecture. More abstracted than White’s string of preceding Naturum projects that began with 1983’s Hornborgasjon centre and foreground a specialist and not particularly representative part of the practices work as a whole. In Sweden White’s Naturum projects have become known for their more exacting design standards, working almost as a practice within a practice, while the larger scale side of White are focused on a slew of public sector hospitals, schools, HE, housing and other projects as well as master-planning major eco-districts in Stockholm, such as Hammerby Sjostad. In Britain White are promoting themselves as Swedish leaders in sustainable building and design. If Southend Pier turns out to showcase design from the office within an office, other UK projects are likely to provide insight into White’s larger scale-corporate approach to sustainability.

A version of this piece appeared in In EcoTech 27 – Nov 2011