Alex Boyce

This animated film is an exploration of melancholy, atmosphere and mood through the design of a series of roadside structures alongside Norway’s largest infrastructure project, the E39. The film presents atmospheres and feelings that appear in contradiction to prevailing cultural attitudes and proposes places, environments and landscapes that encourage the exploration of these emotions.

The reconstruction of the E39 has become the epitome of Norway’s infrastructural aspirations. The project's inception demonstrates the nation’s growing and an unwavering appetite for development on a national scale. The projects consist of the reconstruction of an existing 1100km stretch of highway from Kristiansand in the south to Trondheim in the North. Within the context of the film the E39 becomes the set through which design, narrative, and atmosphere are explored.

In Norway, the Allmannsrett, or in English The Everymans Right, grants everyone the right to access and pass through uncultivated land in the countryside. This building proposal builds on this land designation and roaming right by proposing a key-less shared domestic architecture for short term inhabitation.

The proposal develops a form and materiality that sits between the vernacular and the infrastructural, creating a new regional aesthetic for the length of the E39.

Internal spaces are rich and warm, exposed plaster walls designate the internal core of the building, housing communal respite, cooking, and eating facilities.

Split across five distinct volumes, residential rooms provide privacy and shelter to the weary road traveler. The steeply sloping timber roof acts as a veil over each of the building’s volumes.

Positioned parallel yet removed from the E39 highway this large timber building sits at the foot of the Ulla-Forre, a hydropower complex in Suldal municipality.

Moving north along the E39 we explore how Norway’s historic architectures might be preserved, exhibited, and experienced in a near-future environment. Surrounded by a complex of flyovers, elevated roads, and viewing platforms a challenging labyrinthine journey is created around these iconic remaining structures.

Navigable only by vehicle and designed to elevate visitors to roof level the proposal offers an alternative perspective on these iconic structures.

Returned to the rural west coast from Norway's city-based open-air museums and nestled in Haugsvær, a secluded and sheltered valley are the nation's last remaining Stave churches.

The viewing platform is a stalwart of Norwegian roadside construction. Yet it always seeks to remove one from the detail of the environment. Placed high above the ground or perched off a rocky escarpment, it fails to offer a true space for landscape and atmospheric experience. It instead acts to separate the occupier from the landscape, the earth, and the environment.

It is here in the Vatsfjorden, where one is invited to position themself out into the heart of the environment. This is the final fjord that the recently decommissioned Oil rigs will pass through on their way to be dismantled. As North Sea oil is no longer viable its infrastructure is removed and returned to its origin, the small town of Vatne to be razed to the ground.

The platform acts both as a place of solitude and as a navigational tool in the notoriously treacherous Vatsfjorden. Its illuminated lantern marks the entrance to the Vatsfjorden for the team of tugboats shepherding these structures back home to slowly mark the end of Norway’s age of oil.

Oljevegen: Kvardag (This Oil Road: The Everyday) is the first expression of the projects research into a moving image piece. Kvardag became instrumental in defining the visual story telling of the project and formed a key component in the expression of atmosphere through the manipulation of still and subtly moving imagery.

The four thematic ideas, the natural, the domestic, the regional and the foreign that form the core of the project were initially explored instinctively through this short film. This short film is constructed from a set of digitally manipulated images, handmade paper models, on-location footage and digitally manufactured scenography.

The film sought to test ideas relating to the creation of atmosphere using both static and dynamic elements each layered over one another to augment the still image and enhance the on-location recordings. The use of designed scenography and on-location recordings seek to blur the boundaries between the actual, the probable, and the possible.

Through this methodology each scene becomes a device through which an atmosphere and mood can begin to emanate. This practice became foundational in defining the process through which each aspect of the project was evaluated. Location, scale, material and climatic conditions were all tested and considered as part of this emerging projects visual language.