Background
Bergen International Festival is a music and cultural festival to be held in Bergen in late May and early June each year. The festival is the largest of its kind and contains a wide range of events in music, theater, dance and visual arts at the national and international level. Concerts are held in the Grieg Hall and Haakon’s Hall, in the four composer homes on Siljustøl, Trolhaugen, Lysøen and Valestrandsfossen as well as in a number of city churches, streets and squares. The first festival was held in 1953.

Concept: workshop / behind the scenes
The festival’s former premises were in an older bank building with large individual offices and for their new offices wanted open plan offices for increasingly project based work. We have therefore prepared a project with a high degree of flexibility. The use of the premises changes during the year with a shift from planning period to the festival period in which both the activity and number of employees increases. It requires flexibility both in the workforce and in the use of the premises. We also proposed to facilitate the ability to organize small concerts and exhibitions in the new premises and that way linking the festival as an organization closer to the events they hold.

The festival offices are imagined as workshops where the festival is made, but also as the activity behind the scenes of what’s happening in front of the curtain. We have focused on a production logic where it must be clear that this is a place where you make something. Hence the element of wooden framework which can give the feeling that the project is not fully completed, and glass walls with frames and profiles hidden from the outside so that the boxes rather look like open spaces.

Designed by Eriksen + Skajaa
Project Team: Arild Eriksen, Joakim Skajaa, Julia With
Photo: Rasmus Norlander

http://cargocollective.com/eriksenskajaa