Rundtjernveien is a 100 m² refurbishment of a narrow apartment in a functionalist concrete building on the outskirts of Oslo. The design exposes the structural fabric and introduces selective timber and translucent elements to recalibrate thresholds, daylight, and domestic use while keeping the plan open and adaptable.
Rundtjernveien Technical Information
- Architects: Studio Et al.
- Location: Oslo, Norway
- Gross Area: 100 m2 | 1,076 Sq. Ft.
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: © Willem Pab
The project is about stripping back rather than adding. Together forming an aesthetic of something unfinished or in constant change.
– Studio Et al.
Subtractive Renovation and Structural Legibility
The refurbishment proceeds by subtraction. Floors and walls are sanded to the structural layer, revealing the concrete slabs and shear walls that organize the building. This exposes the construction grain and clarifies load paths, edge conditions, and slab spans, allowing the apartment to read as a precise cross-section of a functionalist system rather than a set of decorative rooms.
Additions are minimal and positioned only where the body meets the building. Timber and soft surfaces occur at points of touch, repose, and privacy, while most surfaces remain as-found. The result is a legible hierarchy in which the concrete frame operates as the primary finish and permanent substrate, and lighter components register as contingent, replaceable layers that can be altered without compromising the structure.
This approach reduces visual noise and makes construction logic an active design element. Junctions between old and new are left articulate rather than concealed, so that thresholds, reveals, and fixings describe how the parts work together over time.
Linear Plan, Platforms, and Thresholds
The apartment is narrow and connects two façades, a condition amplified rather than corrected. A generous hall intensifies the long axis, extends sight lines, and binds entrances, kitchen, and living areas into a clear sequence. The through-plan allows daylight and air to be read across the width of the slab, reinforcing the apartment’s structural and spatial continuity.
Massive Douglas fir boards are laid directly atop the exposed slab as low platforms to establish intimate zones without building full-height partitions. These calibrated changes in level create thresholds for sleeping, sitting, and storage, producing an internal topography that modulates program while preserving the plan’s openness. The tactile warmth and depth of the fir boards counterbalance the concrete’s coolness and invite barefoot use.
At the center, a cast-in-place concrete island with local aggregate anchors the kitchen and mediates between cooking and living. Its mass stabilizes the plan, acting as a datum within the long spatial field. The island’s material continuity with the structural shell links daily domestic activity to the building’s tectonic character.
Light Mediation and Porous Partitions
Daylight is filtered deep into the plan using lightweight timber frames infilled with fiberglass sheets. These translucent planes soften transitions between zones and admit a diffuse glow, reducing contrast between façade-adjacent rooms and the central hall. The assemblies read as spatial membranes rather than walls, supporting a sense of continuity across the apartment’s length.
Porous boundaries allow programs to overlap without collapsing into a single undifferentiated space. Visual silhouettes remain legible, yet privacy is maintained through opacity gradients, reflections, and controlled permeability. The material’s fibered surface scatters light, tempering glare and stabilizing luminance across the day.
The lighting strategy builds on this logic, favoring even, indirect illumination that supports the open-plan character. By avoiding solid opaque partitions, both natural and artificial light operate as connective elements, ensuring deep rooms remain visually and atmospherically linked to the façades.
Material Assembly and Open-Endedness
The palette is restricted to materials in their own colors: exposed concrete, Douglas fir, pine, and stained oak. The contrast between robust shell and warmer inserts produces a tactile interior calibrated to Oslo’s climate, where thermal mass, soft timber underfoot, and localized warmth at points of rest work together. Finishes accept wear as part of their expression, allowing patina to register patterns of use rather than obscuring them.
Place-built elements are constructed directly and legibly. Niches, benches, and simple storage pieces in pine and oak compress the plan at selected points, supporting everyday rituals such as tying shoes or hanging towels. Their detailing is straightforward, making the relationship between function and construction explicit.
Crucially, structural and replaceable components are kept distinct. The concrete frame remains intact and visible, while platforms, partitions, and furnishings can be reconfigured or replaced. This separation supports long-term adaptability and yields an aesthetic of purposeful incompleteness, where the apartment can absorb future change without eroding its architectural clarity.
About Studio Et al.
Studio Et al. is an architecture practice based in Oslo, Norway, founded in 2020. Their approach emphasizes structural clarity, material honesty, and spatial adaptability. The studio often works by subtraction, revealing underlying construction systems and introducing minimal, tactile interventions that heighten domestic experience while preserving openness and long-term flexibility.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Client: Private
- Construction company: Byggmester Nerli
- Other contributors (Concrete work): Oa studio
