Bjerkebaek Visitors Center in Lillehammer is a museum threshold built at the edge of Sigrid Undset’s protected home and garden. Designed as a low linear structure between road and landscape, it reorganizes access to the site through a deliberate reversal: a closed masonry face addresses the street, while glazed public rooms open toward the historic log houses and cultivated grounds. The project combines archive, exhibition, cafe, and auditorium functions within a compact plan whose architectural force lies in mediation rather than monumentality.
Bjerkebaek Visitors Center Technical Information
- ArchitectsHølmebakk Øymo
- LocationLillehammer, Norway
- Gross Area365 m2 | 3929 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2006 – 2019
- Photographs© Hølmebakk Øymo
Throughout the process the organisation of the building has been simple, almost schematic, both functionally and conceptually, which has made it relatively robust in the long process from competition to built structure.
– Carl-Viggo Holmebakk
Threshold, Buffer, and Site Strategy
The visitors center is set along the northern edge of the protected property as a long, low bar that operates less as a freestanding pavilion than as a perimeter condition. Facing Sigrid Undsets vei, where sports grounds and parking areas shape the approach, the building presents an almost wall-like profile. In this context, its primary urban task is not representation but filtration. The project absorbs the disorder of the roadside and converts it into a controlled sequence of approach, delaying the encounter with the historic site.
This siting establishes a firm spatial distinction between outside and inside. The street facade remains reserved, built in pale concrete masonry and punctuated only by limited openings, a recessed entrance, and small canopy elements. By contrast, the garden side unfolds into curved glazed surfaces and terraces directed toward Undset’s house and the surrounding vegetation. The building, therefore, acts as the only formal public gateway to the site, making access itself part of the museum experience.
Its single-story horizontality also matters in relation to the older buildings. Rather than competing with the vertical silhouette and material density of the relocated log structures, the center withdraws into the ground plane. This recession is not neutral. It sharpens the legibility of the protected ensemble by framing it, much as a retaining wall or garden boundary can intensify the presence of what lies beyond. From deeper within the garden, the building reads as a muted edge condition, often partially obscured by birch trunks, meadow growth, and seasonal ground cover.
Plan Organization and Spatial Reversal
The plan is based on a simple but effective inversion. Service rooms, support spaces, and back-of-house functions line the street side, allowing the north facade to remain closed and protective. Public rooms occupy the opposite edge, where cafe, foyer, shop, and exhibition spaces open toward the garden through transparent or translucent facades. This arrangement gives the building a strong directional bias. One enters through compression and enclosure, then gradually encounters light, view, and landscape.
The resulting sequence is carefully calibrated. Arrival from the road is introverted, marked by masonry and concrete, with limited visual exposure. Inside, this restraint gives way to a more expansive field defined by curved glazing, filtered daylight, and oblique views to the historic residence. The old house is not simply visible from the interior. It becomes part of the spatial composition, operating as both subject and backdrop. In this sense, the visitors’ center functions as an interpretive device, orienting visitors before any formal exhibition begins.
The concrete ramp extending over the former paddock intensifies this mediation. It is an access route but also a promenade that reconstructs the relationship among topography, the garden, and the museum threshold. The low concrete parapets guide movement without theatricality, hovering just enough above the ground to mark a transition from contemporary insertion to protected terrain. Seen in section and in photographs across different seasons, the ramp appears less as an appendage than as an extension of the building’s organizational logic: a controlled release from enclosure toward the cultivated inner landscape.
Material Language, Structure, and Detail
The project relies on a narrow range of materials handled with unusual consistency. In situ concrete, concrete masonry, channel glass, structural glazing, zinc, slate, tile, and pine form the core of the construction, with most surfaces left untreated or only minimally finished. This restraint is not a matter of austerity alone. It permits the building’s spatial distinctions to emerge through shifts in mass, opacity, reflection, and texture rather than through applied effect. The contrast between the heavy street facade and the lighter garden facade is therefore both tectonic and atmospheric.
On the roadside, the concrete masonry gives the building a dense, reticent presence. Toward the garden, curved channel-glass walls and larger glazed openings transform the same linear bar into something more permeable. The channel glass produces a milky, diffuse light that softens the transition between the interior and the vegetation, while the fully transparent areas frame the old house with greater precision. This duality between shielding and opening is the central material argument of the project, and it is reinforced at every scale, from the larger facades to the timber-framed doors and zinc flashings.
Inside, structure and finish remain closely aligned. The exposed concrete soffit, polished aggregate floor, and cast concrete benches register the building as a continuous structural field rather than a decorated enclosure. Timber insertions, including counters, door frames, columns, and freestanding acoustic elements, provide warmth without dissolving the logic of the concrete shell. What is notable is how little distinction there is between constructive necessity and spatial effect. The tactile quality of the main rooms comes directly from bearing walls, slabs, glazing systems, and built-in furnishings, not from later layers added to compensate for them.
Addition, Adaptability, and Architectural Tension
The 2019 auditorium addition extends the project at the west end by enclosing the previously open terrace. Formally, it introduces a different type of geometry. Where the original building depends on orthogonal order moderated by gentle curves, the new volume projects into the garden through a faceted glazed envelope. The stepped perimeter approximates curvature through a sequence of angled glass panels, giving the addition a more crystalline edge while preserving the low horizontal datum of the larger complex.
This intervention is significant because it does not erase the original structure. Existing concrete columns remain within the new envelope, and the glazed skin reads as a later climatic layer wrapped around an earlier architectural frame. The result is a building within a building, or more precisely, an accretion in which environmental control, structural continuity, and altered use are visibly entangled. Curtains, concrete soffits, perimeter benches, and the faceted glass wall together create a room whose spatial character depends on superimposition rather than compositional unity.
The addition also clarifies a larger question already present in the original scheme: how far can architectural simplicity carry a project over time? The center’s robust organization has clearly supported adaptation, allowing new uses and enclosures to be inserted without destroying its primary order. Yet the architect’s own remarks point to a productive tension between conceptual clarity and architectural depth. A plan can be strong, direct, and durable, while the finer questions of proportion, atmosphere, and detail remain unresolved until the long process of building tests them. Bjerkebaek is compelling precisely because it does not disguise that tension. Its schematic discipline is real, but so is the friction between system, site, and the subtler demands of inhabitation.
About Carl-Viggo Holmebakk
Founded in 1990 and based in Oslo since 1992, Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk AS, rebranded as Hølmebakk Øymo in 2024 under co-principal Elisabeth Øymo, is a Norwegian architectural office recognized for its sensitive, site-specific approach, often working within the Norwegian landscape and in dialogue with protected heritage settings.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Tonning and Lieng AS
- Client: De Sandvikske Samlinger, Maihaugen
- Other contributors: Photography by Carl-Viggo Holmebakk and Rickard Riesenfeld
