Tabula Rasa Architecture School: A Trondheim Workshop Where Gravity Draws the Front Door

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "Tabula Rasa Architecture School: A Trondheim Workshop Where Gravity Draws the Front Door" about?

This article covers topics related to Cultural Architecture, Educational Building, Architectural Experience, Experiential Architecture, Youth Architecture, Norwegian Architecture, School Architecture. A see-and-learn school-workshop that turns structural logic into a lesson, pairing a hanging-vault entrance with open study halls and glazed labs.

A see-and-learn school-workshop that turns structural logic into a lesson, pairing a hanging-vault entrance with open study halls and glazed labs.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Cultural Architecture, Educational Building on Oct 29, 2026

Most architecture schools teach gravity on a whiteboard. Students learn about load paths, thrust and catenaries from diagrams, then wait years to see those forces take shape in anything they build. This proposal puts the lesson at the entrance instead: a row of white vaults that you have to walk under before you reach a single classroom.

Tabula Rasa Architecture School, designed by Alexandra Kalendareva for a site in Trondheim, Norway, was named Winner at Elementary. The project describes itself as an Architectural Learning School-Workshop organised around a "see-and-learn" idea. It combines large public study spaces, exhibition halls and small laboratory classes, and it wants a visitor to understand the building simply by looking at it.

A Facade Hung From Its Own Weight

The central part of the facade, in the project's own words, comes from a "gravitational approach" meant to help students grasp "the essence of gravity in architecture." The long section shows what that means. Beneath the floor plates, the ceiling drops in a sequence of deep, uneven troughs, like a fabric pinned at points and left to sag. At ground level these curves become a white arched canopy over the paved plaza, with legs that land on the ground at irregular spacing. The form reads as found rather than drawn, which is the point: a structure whose shape records the forces moving through it.

The flanking wings take a more restrained approach. Pale panel cladding sweeps down from a glazed upper corner to a low wall at the plaza edge, curving the way a sheet of paper bends when lifted at one end. In the misty render, with a bare birch in the foreground, the building is a quiet grey presence. The drama is concentrated in the centre, and the wings play a supporting role.

Rendering of a school facade with a white arched entrance canopy over a paved plaza, with a long section drawing of the vaulted undulating ceiling above, under. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Curving panel facade sweeping down to a low wall, with a pedestrian crossing the plaza behind a bare birch tree in mist. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Two Curving Wings and a Spine Between Them

The exploded axonometric separates the roof, two floor levels and the ground plan, and labels the school's academic, administrative, recreational and public zones. Two arcing wings bend away from a central public spine, and the vaulted ceiling fragments float in the gap between levels. The diagram makes the hierarchy clear: the expressive structure belongs to the shared middle, while the wings hold the cellular rooms that a school still needs.

That split is also where the scheme is most open to criticism. Etan Kimmel, who judged the competition, saw the vaults as an idea the rest of the plan never fully took up:

the rigid form of the plan becomes problematic to solve nicely
the free innovative way that the vauts were designed could have been a triger for the entire plan of the schoolEtan Kimmel, Co-Founder, Kimmel Eshkolot Architects

Exploded axonometric drawing separating roof, two floor levels and ground plan, with academic, administrative, recreational and public zones labeled. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

A Double-Height Workshop Under Glass

Inside, the strongest space is the double-height hall. Rust-coloured steel columns march along a curved wall, a balcony volume bulges overhead, and a glazed skylight pours light onto long black worktables. A steel stair climbs along the glass on one side, so movement between levels stays visible from the floor below. This is the see-and-learn idea at the scale of a room: the columns, the stair structure and the roof framing are all left on display.

The recreation lounge follows the same logic with a lighter touch. Grey bean bags and an air hockey table sit at the foot of a tall glass wall, bare branches visible outside, while a steel stair and open shelving frames rise behind. Ignacio José Imwinkelried, who judged the competition, praised how consistently these interiors follow from the project's starting premise, while pointing to the same typological tension:

This is a project that articulates the conceptual instance with the practical development very well. There is a very coherent search throughout the development of the presentation that goes from the study of the context, the geometric definition of the building and the incorporation of the structure in relation to the program.
All this results in an interior space according to the new methodologies and learning / teaching formats of architecture.
A weak point visible in the plans is the need for a deeper study of the typological development of the building. An unresolved clash between traditional and new typological schemes is still very evident.Ignacio José Imwinkelried, Mtr. Arch. Founding Partner, Deriva Taller de Arquitectura, Argentina

Double-height hall with rust-colored steel columns, a curved balcony volume and a glazed skylight roof above black tables and a stair. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Double-height lounge with grey bean bags, an air hockey table and a steel stair beside a tall glass wall with bare branches outside. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Study Rooms That Look Down on Lectures

The smaller learning spaces stack and overlap instead of closing themselves off. A glazed mezzanine study room, lined with bookshelves, hangs above a tiered lecture seating area, so a reader upstairs can follow a lecture below without being part of it. Elsewhere, timber stepped seating with fold-down desks rises beside a pale panel wall, with pine trees framed by a window at the top of the rake.

These rooms carry the material palette of pale panels and warm timber, but their real quality is visual connection. Glass partitions and shifted floor levels turn study into something you can watch, which supports the brief's emphasis on public study and exhibition over closed classrooms.

Glazed mezzanine study room with bookshelves and a standing reader above a tiered lecture seating area, trees visible through the window. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Timber stepped lecture seating with fold-down desks beside a pale panel wall, with pine trees seen through a window beyond. Image: Alexandra Kalendareva

Why This Project Matters

Tabula Rasa makes a clear argument: an architecture school can teach through its own fabric. Using a gravity-derived vault as the entrance turns structural theory into something felt on arrival, and the exposed steel, open stairs and glazed mezzanines carry that honesty into the interiors. The building is a teaching aid that students occupy every day.

The jury's reservations matter just as much. The free, form-found vaults and the more conventional wings of rooms do not yet speak the same language, and both jurors noticed that gap. That makes the project useful to study: it shows how far a single structural idea can carry a school, and where it would have to spread through the whole plan to reach its full potential.