The project is the work of Oslo-based architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk, whose practice, founded in 1990 and now operating as Hølmebakk Øymo AS with partner Elisabeth Øymo, has built a three-decade body of work at the seam between architecture and landscape, much of it for the Norwegian Scenic Routes program. Vøringsfossen is his longest-running commission and, at 160,000 m², his largest: a nine-year process of surveying the gorge with strung cords, setting every foundation 1.5 metres back from the edge on the geologist’s instruction, and resolving each of its many “events”; the stair bridge, the Fossli overlooks, the Fossatromma service building, as a self-contained architectural reaction to the landscape rather than a product of it.
Voringfossen Technical Information
- ArchitectsHølmebakk Øymo
- LocationVoringfossen, Eidfjord commune, Hordaland, Norway
- Gross Area160000 m2 | 1722226 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2015 – 2024
- Photographs© Hølmebakk Øymo, © Per Berntsen, © Hugo Lutcherath
Our ambition was to create defined places and spaces as architectural reactions to the landscape, more than a result of the landscape.
– Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk
Landscape as Sequence Rather Than Object
At Voringfossen, the central design move is not the creation of a singular viewing platform but the construction of a route. The project organizes the 182-meter waterfall and its gorge into a continuous promenade that makes walking the primary architectural act. The visitor does not arrive at one resolved image of the landscape. Instead, the site unfolds as a chain of episodes, each calibrated to a specific proximity to rock, void, water, fog, or forest.
This sequential approach is visible in the contrast between the major interventions and the quieter passages between them. A stair bridge descends as a thin steel line into the gorge, while elsewhere the route narrows to paths threaded through boulder fields or birch woodland. Concrete plateaus, gangways, benches, and terraces are not treated as incidental infrastructure. Each is given enough formal precision to register as a place with its own spatial character, allowing the promenade to operate less as a neutral circulation device than as a composed series of encounters.
The result is a project that does not attempt to disappear into its setting. The architecture maintains a distinct relationship with the terrain, yet it is carefully placed to interpret the site rather than overwrite it. The waterfall is often framed obliquely, glimpsed through railings, approached from the side, or revealed across distance and fog. This refusal to make the waterfall a single frontal spectacle gives the project a more demanding spatial logic, one in which landscape is understood through movement, interruption, and changing orientation.
Safety, Access, and the Ethics of Intervention
The project emerged from urgent practical conditions. For years, the area around the gorge suffered from erosion, informal footpaths, littering, and repeated fatal accidents. The redesign addresses these problems by replacing diffuse and risky movement with a legible public route. What could have become a purely protective exercise is instead handled as an architectural problem in which safety, access, and perception are inseparable.
Guardrails, stair systems, retaining walls, and surface changes are deployed with notable restraint. In the boulder fields, thin steel railings mark a single safe line without attempting to domesticate the surrounding geological landscape. At overlooks, mesh balustrades and cantilevered edges allow exposure to remain part of the experience while establishing clear physical limits. Thresholds are carefully calibrated. Some spaces open broadly toward the valley, others tighten around stairs, corners, or cliffs, producing a rhythm of compression and release that guides behavior without excessive instruction.
Accessibility here is not limited to compliance in a narrow technical sense. It involves the broader civic question of how a protected and difficult terrain becomes readable to the general public. Signage, drainage, paving, and rest points contribute to this readability. The project accepts that a dramatic landscape carries risk, but it rejects the idea that risk must be managed through visual overcontrol. Instead, it offers a model for intervention in sensitive settings where protection is achieved through clarity of route, precision of detail, and disciplined placement.
Construction Logic and 1:1 Site Making
One of the most instructive aspects of Voringfossen is how it came to be. Rather than relying entirely on abstract site plans, much of the project was set out directly on the ground using cords stretched across the terrain, which were then surveyed. This 1:1 method allowed lines of paths, edges, and foundations to be tested against actual bedrock, trees, and slope conditions before construction was fixed. The resulting geometry carries the evidence of direct negotiation with the site.
A geotechnical requirement that all foundations be pulled 1.5 meters back from the gorge edge became the project’s governing rule. From this setback line, a clear structural and material distinction is established. Behind it, concrete retains, stabilizes, and shapes the ground plane through walls, steps, benches, and slabs. Beyond it, prefabricated steel projects toward the void, forming stair bridges, railings, and cantilevered viewing structures. This division is not merely technical. It gives the project a legible tectonic order in which support and extension are spatially separated.
The refusal to blast rock or undertake major earthworks is equally significant. Rather than clearing the site into compliance, the design adapts itself through cutting, fitting, and incremental adjustment. Concrete slabs wrap around outcrops and tree trunks. Foundations meet rock with measured exactness. Construction photographs of string lines and painted markings on bedrock make clear that the project’s formal discipline depends on close reading rather than force. Precision here is not the smooth abstraction of a detached drawing office. It is the record of repeated contact between design intent and resistant ground.
Material Expression, Detail, and Architectural Identity
The material palette is narrow but highly differentiated in use. Weathering steel carries the exposed, projecting elements that move toward the gorge. Fair-face concrete forms the heavier parts that settle into the terrain. Mesh infill, granite paving, timber walkways, and preserved birch trees complete a vocabulary in which each material is assigned a clear role. The project avoids scenic mimicry. Its materials do not imitate the landscape, but they register weather, moisture, lichen, and seasonal change in ways that bind the architecture to long-term exposure.
The strongest evidence of the project’s intelligence lies in the details. Inset mesh railings sit within curved concrete edges rather than being applied as separate safety devices. Anti-slip studs and drainage grates are treated as part of the architectural assembly, not as later technical corrections. Openings cut into slabs to preserve existing birches are especially telling. These gestures are not ornamental celebrations of nature. They are precise acts of accommodation that reveal how the project addresses bodily movement, runoff, freeze-thaw conditions, and ecological continuity simultaneously.
This discipline extends beyond the major viewpoints. The service building at Fossatromma reads as a compact concrete volume and inhabited retaining wall, its horizontal openings and measured massing giving public amenities the same architectural seriousness as the overlook structures. Benches, signposts, and pictograms are developed within the same formal language, making orientation and rest part of the spatial composition rather than auxiliary additions. Through this consistency, the site acquires an architectural identity distributed across many small elements rather than concentrated in one dominant object.
About Hølmebakk Øymo AS
Hølmebakk Øymo AS is an Oslo-based practice, formerly known as Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk AS. The studio works at the intersection of architecture and landscape and is known for highly site-specific interventions in protected and historically sensitive landscapes, using 1:1 surveying methods, prefabricated steel construction, and cast-in-place concrete carefully adjusted to terrain.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: K. Apeland og Finn Erik Nilsen (special adviser, stair bridge)
- Client: Statens vegvesen, Norwegian Public Roads Administration, Turistvegseksjonen, National Scenic Routes
- Construction company: Mesta, phase 1; Consolvo, phase 2; Mesta, phase 3a; Brun Bygg, phase 3b
- Other contributors: Special adviser, stair bridge: Finn Erik Nilsen
