Oslo, Norway. SALT.

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SALT is a nomadic initiative celebrating the environment, art and culture of the Arctic region. SALT’s mission is environmental. For thousands of years, people in the Artic have followed the rhythm of animals’ movement and seasonal migration. The footprints they have left behind are minimal. SALT illustrates and celebrates the environmental care and respect of this movement for the Arctic landscape and ocean. 
 

SALT was first constructed as an art- and cultural project at Langsanden in the municipality of Gildeskål in 2014. A subsequent destination of the SALT project is in Bjørvika (Oslo) at the water’s edge in the corner of Langkaia and Grev Wedels Plass where four of the triangular-shaped fish-drying installations have been erected and are being used for diverse public activities, among them a large sauna, an interior with a large open fire, a bar, etc. The Scarcity and Creativity project was to design and build the public spaces between and around the triangular-shaped fish-drying racks. 
 

The existing structures, scattered on a tarmac extension that used to be a parking lot, are disposed in an apparently random way, and generate a big central space in the middle of the site. Our intervention is meant to propose solutions for this big central space and the spaces adjoining the waterfront by connecting the existing buildings and reducing the overall impact of the asphalt pavement. 

 

SALT's events can have very different scales. A smaller permanent activity would consist of a bar and the sauna, and bigger events, like concerts, could receive up to 5,000 people. This required a proposal that fulfilled the flexibility of this varied program. There were also different programmatic requirements for the different locations: the waterfront asked for a more permanent program while the big middle space would need to be flexible enough to allow for a large variety of events, while making it interesting when not used.  

 

Our proposal is based on a series of wooden poles, disposed on a regular grid, that hold metal cables with fabrics of different lengths hanging from them. This would generate a constant dynamic movement with the sea breezes. The wires are attached to the existing structures linking them together and bringing cohesion to the whole festival area as well as generating an eye-catching element that would attract people, even from far away, to visit SALT. This intervention would strongly alter the perception of the scale of the site, making it more human friendly, and removing attention from the tarmac. The distance between the poles is 7 meters, that is enough to allow for any of the programmed activities to take place without having to move them every time there is an event. On the edges of the site the cables come down to a series of benches that consist in concrete pieces, massive enough to take the wind loads of the structure, and wood planks that connect them and generate sitting areas on the waterfront.​