The Community Courtyard

The commercial center in Holmlia, built in the 1980s, features large, hard surfaces outdoors, which are scarcely furnished and without programmed activities. The center area has a grocery shop and other essential stores, but it lacks social arenas apart from the bingo, the library, and a pub in the periphery of the center structure. As a result, the spaces between the buildings are often left unused. The OBOS’s plans for a new big box shopping mall in the center area could potentially amplify this condition, and there is a concern within the community that the few small-scale businesses will suffer. Smaller spaces outside of big mall structures are often more suitable for entrepreneurship and are typically a way into the job market for new arrivals, thereby contributing to inclusion. This aspect has guided the programming and design of the project proposal The Community Courtyard, and the project challenges both the existing situation and the plans for the area.

Interviews and conversations with the residents of Holmlia led to an understanding of a strong sense of community, pride, and love for the area. The community members stressed the need for more spaces, not bigger and fewer spaces, as a physical framework for realizing their ideas and ambitions. Based on this, the Community Courtyard project is designed as a perforated structure that constitutes a central part of the center area which retains generous areas for shopping but also facilitates local entrepreneurs, other low-threshold initiatives, and quotidian life.

The ground floor of the Community Courtyard structure is designed to allow free movement throughout the area, with visual connections across the site—a design that promotes an inclusive environment and contributes to a feeling of safety. A variety of wall types were designed to encourage different levels of openness, strengthening main routes through the site and leading people into the central courtyard. The varied sizes of ground floor spaces can accommodate a range of uses and different scales, from commercial shops, co-working spaces, cafes, and restaurants that are accessible to both the inner courtyard and the external streets. The façade of the new center was designed as a massive wood system with vertical timber battens with varying depths to create an active façade that brings light and shaded areas into the courtyard.

The Community Courtyard project is a redesigned and reprogrammed version of the existing center area and is presented as an alternative to the existing and planned Holmlia Center.