Mirrors don't lie: A Trondheim Architecture School That Hangs a Reflective Block Over Its Own Entrance

Walk toward this building and the first thing you see is yourself, broken into shards. The underside of its highest block is not a ceiling but a crumpled field of mirrored facets, hovering a full storey above the parking court and throwing fragments of grass, cars and grey Norwegian sky back at anyone who arrives. For a school meant to train architects, it is a pointed opening move: before you learn to look at buildings, the building looks back at you.

Mirrors don't lie is a proposal for an architecture school in Trondheim, Norway, designed by Xsenia Toropova and Anastasia Filatova. The project received Editor's Choice at Elementary. Its renderings move from a dramatic cantilever outside to an interior organised around a covered street, workshops and a skylit gallery, and they invite a fair question: does the spectacle of the exterior carry through to the way the school actually teaches?

A Cantilever That Turns Its Belly Into a Mirror

The defining gesture is a long upper volume clad in rust-toned panels that slides out well beyond the white mass below it. Seen from low on the lawn, its soffit reads as a faceted, reflective underside, folded into angled planes rather than kept flat. A second, smaller box projects at the lower level, also wrapped in rust-coloured panels, so the composition steps outward in two cantilevers stacked one above the other. The title graphic on the cover board and a circular site map floated in the clouds make it clear that this reflective underside is the image the team wants remembered.

The trick works best in silhouette. Under heavy overcast skies, the white facade, with its scattered vertical window slots, goes quiet while the copper tones and the glinting soffit do the talking. From further along the drive, a zigzag roofline appears along the top of the upper block, and the entrance on the right is marked by a separate set of angled timber-toned fins that frame the doorway like the gable of a pitched house.

Stacked White Boxes Wearing Green Roofs

Behind the cantilever, the building is assembled from distinct white volumes that overlap, cross and step down toward the ground. The lower boxes carry planted roofs, so the terraces read as raised lawns tucked beneath the overhang rather than leftover rooftops. Red external stairs zigzag down one end of a wing, giving the otherwise orderly facade a vivid secondary rhythm. In the aerial view toward the pine forest, these green roofs line up with the landscape at grade, and the whole complex begins to look less like a single object and more like a cluster of blocks shuffled into place.

The entrance elevation shows the same logic at a gentler scale: timber fins rise over an angled canopy, a green terrace sits on the lower box, and the long glazed upper block runs the length of the composition. The palette is disciplined throughout: white panels, a dark grey base, copper-coloured accents and glass.

Wings Spread Across a Suburban Campus

The aerial rendering places the school among low white massing models of its neighbours, with a residential district rising behind. The building spreads into several wings around lawns, paths and rows of red shrubs, and a circular paved plaza with a ring of seating sits at the edge of the site. On the courtyard side, the ground floor opens up as continuous glazing beneath a zigzag roofline, facing a sunken circular seating area. This is where the school touches the ground most generously, and it is the most convincing outdoor room in the scheme: a place for crits, gatherings or simply sitting out between studio hours.

An Indoor Street of Timber Huts Beneath Crossing Stairs

Inside, the plan pivots around a tall glazed atrium labelled "The street." Concrete stairs crisscross up through its full height, so movement between floors becomes a visible event, and a stepping-stone path threads between small slatted timber pavilions shaped like pitched-roof houses. These huts are the most humane idea in the project: miniature rooms inside a big room, offering a bench or a soft chair for a conversation without walling anyone off from the activity around them. A slatted coffee kiosk with colourful stools anchors another stretch of the same street, under the same tangle of stairs.

Collage studies sketch out how the street might be used. One shows a small bakery kiosk with a planted roof and café tables beside a leafy wall, captioned as a coffee break on the main street. Another lays turf across the floor and scatters yellow poufs in front of a projected image, framed as watching educational films in the same corridor. These are simple scenarios, but they argue that the circulation spine of an architecture school should double as its common room, its cinema and its café.

Workshops Under Exposed Ducts and House-Shaped Pods

The workshop hall keeps the industrial honesty of exposed ductwork and linear ceiling lights, then softens it with bands of green and ochre on the ceiling and floor. Along the glass wall, a row of house-shaped green pods repeats the pitched-roof motif from the street, lit from within by glowing outlines. Painted on the far wall is the line "Mirror makes the space complete," a reminder that the concept follows the visitor indoors. A second workshop view swaps straight tables for curved wooden desks clustered loosely in front of glass-walled meeting rooms, while a collage shows students sprawled on a timber floor around a sofa and a yellow pouf, discussing their projects.

The interiors suggest a genuine interest in informal, peer-to-peer learning, though the question is whether the building as a whole is shaped by that interest or simply decorated by it. Ignacio José Imwinkelried, who judged the competition, put the tension plainly:

Although this project has an interesting study of the context and its conditions, this is not clearly reflected in its final resolution.
It seems to me that there is an interesting search to understand the new ways of teaching / learning architecture and how this is reflected in interesting interior spaces. However, I believe the proposed architectural typology does not respond adequately to changes in educational paradigms.Ignacio José Imwinkelried, Mtr. Arch. Founding Partner, Deriva Taller de Arquitectura, Argentina

A Skylit Gallery Where Student Work Meets the Stair

The exhibition hall is the most refined interior in the set. A glazed roof washes the stone-grey walls with daylight, framed paintings hang in a steady rhythm under small wall lights, and a white horse sculpture and wireframe geometric forms sit on illuminated plinths. A stair climbs out of the room toward the upper level, and from there a glass-roofed gallery walkway runs along wall-mounted display boards, its balustrade overlooking the hall below. Placing the gallery on a route rather than at a dead end means that work on display is seen by people passing through, not only by those who came to look.

Why This Project Matters

Mirrors don't lie makes a clear bet: that an architecture school should be legible as a lesson in itself, from the reflective soffit that confronts every arrival to the indoor street where stairs, huts and kiosks put daily life on show. Its strongest moments are the in-between spaces, the slatted huts, the sunken courtyard seating and the gallery walkway, where the design gives students places to linger, talk and watch one another work.

Its weaker point is the one the jury identified. The exterior is dramatic and the interiors are inviting, yet the overall typology of stacked wings and corridors remains fairly conventional for a building that wants to rethink how architecture is taught. That gap is exactly what makes the project worth studying: it shows how far atmosphere and programming can push a familiar form, and where a bolder reworking of the plan itself would be needed to match the ambition of its mirrored title.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designers: Xsenia Toropova, Anastasia Filatova

Competition and award

Editor's Choice, Elementary

Jury

Ignacio José Imwinkelried, Mtr. Arch. Founding Partner, Deriva Taller de Arquitectura, Argentina

Location

Trondheim, Norway

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