Europan Norway

The jury recognizes the seedling strategy as an intelligent and poetic way of linking the city and the new waterfront development areas together. HN123 gives a new dynamic to the abandoned area, allowing time and space for a flexible urbanization of Lake Mjøsa.

HN 123  takes the contaminated ground of the competition area and the relatively slow city expansion a condition for investigating a strategy for phased development. The first step is to put several platforms with public programmes into the study area. Each platform has a specific programme such as theatre, greenhouse, spa and swimming pool, convention centre, etc. At the same time, the area is made accessible for the inhabitants by creating a series of connecting bridges across the rail tracks. The bridges create a direct link between the city and the platforms, weaving the urban tissue together. An important move is to investigate the relationship between these urban seeds and the waterfront. This allows for a varied waterfront shaped by the specific functions of each urban hotspot. The diagrammatically illustrated waterfront shows a great liveliness in how it relates built and open spaces. As the platforms (seeds) develop, they “grow”, becoming urban blocks.

Despite being loose and not integrative, this strategy offers an interesting vision of the site, one that rejects the generic future that the current city plan promotes. It allows the enormous Strandsonen area to develop over time and not according to a preconceived image. The jury questioned how the platform seeds could actually grow over time. Still, the project is highly original and sophisticated in its approach and prepares the ground for a high quality urban development. This project has, in a daring way, visualized how the people of Hamar can play a vital role in developing their own city.

RT477 reflects on the railway station as the infrastructural hub and motor for strengthening the city centre and starting off the development of Strandsonen.A multifuctional bridge is proposed for the site, closest to the railway station. The multifunctional rail-bridge (“XL balcony”) creates a physical and programmatic link between the city and the future Strandsonen development.The rail-bridge-complex can become a magnet, capable of generating urban life in the city centre. By stitching together spaces for a series of new public programmes, this mega-structure strengthens the role of the station area as an important hub for the city and the region. The rest of the competition area, on the other hand, becomes a display for experimental housing focusing on low-energy consumption both in production and use phases. The rail-town housing makes use of the railway tracks as a way to structure future development.

By introducing a large-scale building, RT477 instigates an important discussion of the role of the train station area as a motor in the urban development of potential regional importance.

The jury values the project’s strategy of inserting several key architectural elements, rather than drawing up a whole new city for Strandsonen, as so many competition entries have done.As an idea in itself, the great flexibility of the housing project is interesting, but it does not show a convincing urban infrastructure for this spesific space.

HK250 stood out among the many proposals, with its soberly and beautifully illustrated idea, but it did not cast new light on the urban questions raised in the competition. A main reason for the jury to award the HK250 project is its strong and poetic contribution to the public space along the lake. This simple, but poetic system of pathways shifts from being a passage under the railway tracks, to becoming a parallel “platform” with hard surfaces towards the urban grid, and wooden surfaces towards the Mjøsa lake and the marshlands. HK250 gives the area a grand experience of the open landscape, water tide, railway and industrial landscape and the future development of Strandsonen