The Northern lights: An Architecture College in Trondheim Built Around the Act of Watching

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This article covers topics related to Educational Building, Architecture. Anastasia Askerko stacks three low floor plates near Dragvoll, opening its workshops to neighbours and turning a tiered drawing hall to the horizon.

Anastasia Askerko stacks three low floor plates near Dragvoll, opening its workshops to neighbours and turning a tiered drawing hall to the horizon.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Educational Building, Architecture on Oct 28, 2026

Most architecture schools hide their best work in pin-up rooms behind closed doors. This one tries to put the learning on display: models, panels, stained glass and easels set where anyone passing through can stop, look and absorb how the discipline actually gets made. The premise is simple and persuasive. A school for designers should let you see design happening.

The Northern lights by Anastasia Askerko proposes an architectural college in Trondheim, Norway, on a site the project sheets place in North Hogdalen near Dragvoll, a low-rise, largely agricultural area surrounded by greenery. The project received Editor's Choice at Elementary. Its stated driver is a "look and learn" principle, drawing on the natural forms of Norway: mountains, glaciers and the aurora that gives the scheme its name.

Three floor plates held low against the Dragvoll landscape

The exploded axonometric explains the whole organisation at a glance. The ground floor carries public spaces and creative workshops, the second floor holds classrooms, an exhibition space and a gym, and the third floor is reserved for architectural design and layout classes. The building climbs from open to focused as you go up, so the most public programme sits closest to the street grid and the most specialised studio work occupies the top.

The height is a deliberate restraint. The sheets note that the surrounding development is low, so the college stops at three storeys and reads horizontally rather than as an object rising above its neighbours. The plates splay and kink rather than stacking neatly, each one shifting its outline to follow the angled geometry of the site.

Exploded axonometric diagram of three stacked floor plates over a street grid, labeled with first, second and third floor uses. Image: Anastasia Askerko

A lobby where the stair counts the floors out loud

The entrance hall is the clearest expression of the aurora and glacier references. A dark, faceted wall runs along one side, its folded planes split by slivers of light, while a warm timber ceiling floats overhead. The stair is treated as signage: large illuminated numerals on each landing turn vertical circulation into a readable diagram of the building.

Curved timber benches, stacked like contour lines, sit loose on the floor rather than against walls. They invite people to stop in the middle of the room, which suits a project whose own text argues that comfortable common spaces raise the mood of a school and help ideas circulate.

Rendered lobby with a faceted dark lit wall, curved timber benches, a stair with floor numbers and visitors under a wood ceiling. Image: Anastasia Askerko

Workshops that the neighbourhood is allowed to use

The most generous civic move is easy to miss. According to the project sheets, the ground-floor creative workshops can be freely visited by residents of the surrounding village, not only by those enrolled at the college. Painting, academic drawing and stained glass are listed among the crafts on offer, and the workshop render shows exactly that: a heavy timber worktable under a long suspended lamp, coloured glass panels propped against walls, shelving stocked with materials.

In a mostly agricultural setting with institutional pockets nearby, opening the making spaces to outsiders turns the school into a shared resource. The room itself is plain and well lit, a neutral container where the colour comes from the work rather than the architecture.

Rendered workshop with a large timber table under a hanging lamp, stained glass panels, shelving and people working in daylight. Image: Anastasia Askerko

A tiered drawing hall turned to the horizon

The drawing hall is where "look and learn" becomes literal. Broad steps descend toward a statue on a round plinth, with easels scattered across the treads and framed panels hung on a grid of rods along the back wall. The tiers double as seating, so an audience can watch a drawing session as easily as join one.

A large window crossed by diagonal mullions fills the far wall with a sunset landscape. The angled lines echo the faceted exterior and the light shafts that cut through the presentation sheets, linking the room's interior to the jagged massing that the elevations borrow from mountain ridgelines.

Rendered tiered seating hall with a statue on a round plinth, easels, framed panels on the wall and a diagonal-mullioned window at sunset. Image: Anastasia Askerko

Where the sloping roofs stop short of the view

The plans reveal two distinct bodies: a square block on a regular column grid and an angled bar that bends around a central void, the two meeting at a faceted hinge where the main stair sits. The sections show the roof rising in a long slope, and one section drops a stepped volume into the ground. Yet the rooms within these forms remain largely conventional boxes, and the expressive geometry rarely shapes the interior experience beyond the lobby and the drawing hall.

Ignacio José Imwinkelried, who judged the competition, put his finger on precisely this gap, and also on an opportunity the roofs leave unused:

Although the project starts from an interesting idea, I think that it does not manage to remain solid until its final form.
There is a disconnect between the typological development and the interior spatialities that do not allow to fully exploit the study of the new paradigms in the teaching / learning of architecture.
Finally, the large sloping roofs would have allowed the public access to interesting views of the fjords that can be seen from the site.Ignacio José Imwinkelried, Mtr. Arch. Founding Partner, Deriva Taller de Arquitectura, Argentina

Presentation sheet with second and third floor plan drawings between a building section at top and a long section below. Image: Anastasia Askerko

Why This Project Matters

The Northern lights makes a sound argument about architectural education: visibility is a teaching tool. By placing workshops, exhibitions and a stepped drawing hall where people pass, and by letting village residents use the making spaces, the project treats the school as a public stage for the discipline rather than a sealed institution. The low, three-storey profile shows equal respect for the context it joins.

Its weaknesses are just as instructive. A building that borrows from glaciers and ridgelines outside needs that ambition to carry through into the rooms within, and its inclined roofs could have become the most public room of all, a walkable platform toward the landscape. The scheme points toward a school that teaches by showing; its next iteration would let the form itself do more of the showing.