Soldagen: In the Interval wins first place

Soldagen: In the Interval has won first place in GENDO 48: Soldagen. The result is published on GENDO's Soldagen competition page.

The competition was extremely tough. Thirty-three schemes made the shortlist, and the entries were fantastic across the board: careful, inventive readings of a very difficult site, several of which we would have been glad to have drawn ourselves. We did not take the result for granted against a field like that, and congratulations to everyone who entered.

The brief asked for a bathhouse at Vindstad, a village with no road at the head of Kjerkfjorden in Lofoten, for residents first and visitors second, in ordinary winter use. For around three weeks each December the sun does not clear the mountain there at all, and Soldagen is the day it returns. Our proposal works with that absence rather than lighting it away. The building closes to the mountain, opens to the water and frames the peak across the fjord that catches the sun long before the village does. You see the light, you walk the copper passages towards it, and eventually you stand in it.

The research came before the drawing. A panel of AI agents, built on the brief and a library of work on circadian light, thermal comfort and restorative environments, was asked for hypotheses rather than images, and the circadian assumptions were fixed as rules the plans had to pass. When the scheme was shortlisted we said the part we cared about most was that those assumptions were legible to somebody other than us. It is good to know they were.

Thank you to GENDO for setting a brief this specific, and to the jury: Mariana Cabugueira, Joshua Vermillion, Cira Oller, Thea Jiang, Kurt Chan and Oliver Thomas.

Design led by Luke Parkhurst and Michaella Tafalla, with the visualisation and the film by Afterform Studio. The full project, including the concept film and the research, is published as Soldagen: In the Interval, and how we work on entries like this is set out under competition visualisation.