The Mortensrud Church by Jensen + Skodvin Arkitektkontor takes the familiar materiality of stone, a material historically associated with Christian chuch architecture, and celebrates it literally and figuratively through its elevation in defiance of its expectations as a heavy material that wants to rest directly on the ground. Structures made of lighter material such as mud and wood employ stone as a practical foundation, while Florentine palaces celebrate the heaviness of stone and stability it provides through the expressively rusticated masonry employed at their lowest stories. The church at Mortensrud defies the established conventions and expectations of stone by lifting the entirely stones off the ground with a steel framework, in effect communicating the bizarre image of a floating stone wall. Beyond the already powerful aspiration to the miraculous defiance of gravity inherited from the medieval builders of Gothic churches, the specific decisions the designers made in construction take a clear, one-liner concept and invest in it layers of tectonic richness.
The stone infill wall of the steel frame is built without mortar, which allows light to shine through the gaps created by the meeting of the naturally irregular shapes of the stones. In contrast to the expectation of stone walls as formidable barriers that block light, the stones at Mortensrud form a permeable screen that modulates natural light in a manner again harking back to medieval precedents, where tracery pierces heavy stone walls to dematerialize them in light, a move not only aspiring to the miraculous, but also to the numinous in the Christian sensibility, bringing to mind the transcendence of the divinity and humanity of Christ narrated in the story of his luminous transfiguration before three of his disciples on a mountain.
As with medieval stone tracery, the stones at Mortensrud act structurally in addition to defining the atmosphere of the interior space. The stones are stiffened horizontally into a wall by steel plates embedded among them, spanning between the steel columns of the main structural frame. The plates can stiffen the wall only when the weight of the stones is added to the structure. Thus, the steel plates and the stones are integral to each other’s stability, making them integral to the structural ensemble that forms the floating wall. The floating masonry walls in turn suggest a role in stabilizing the steel frame that carries them, although their actual composition prevents them from fulfilling the stabilizing role of shear walls, leaving this role to conventional moment connections aided by an expressively singular instance of diagonal bracing. Structural integrity thus exists literally and is expressed figuratively.
One may simply copy the exact materials and structure of the church and achieve at the bare minimum, though necessarily stripped of novelty, the same immediately clear yet visually, symbolically, and structurally layered tectonic expression of the church at Mortensrud. However, the designers have anchored the specificity of the building as an instance in the world of architecture that is impossible to be replicated with its full power by the way the materials and structure of the building relate to its site placement and its environment. In the nave, bare rock protrudes through the floor and interrupts the regularity of the pews. The obtrusive rock deliberately expresses the specific design intention to leave the site, dominated by a rocky ridge, largely untouched. The church sits lightly and comfortably on the rocky site, interacting with it without disturbing it through the dialogue of contrast between stones artificially contrived to float in lightness and rock left untouched in its natural state of earthy respite as an artifact representing a comprehensive set of design decisions. The church at Mortensrud embodies tectonics as an exercise beyond internal logic. Without weaving the internal structural and material logic at the core of tectonic definition with practical and expressive concerns beyond the materials and structure of the building itself, tectonics cannot achieve its full potential in the quest to ground architecture in complex relational webs of relevance if not in the clear and solid surety of platonic truth.
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