Stavanger, a large city in the southwest of Norway, is called the "oil capital". It is there that the state-owned oil company Statoil is based, 11th in the world in terms of revenues among oil and gas corporations and 26th among all firms without distinction in areas of activity.
Five teams were invited to participate in the closed competition after the qualification stage - Snøhetta, SANAA together with Helen & Hard, Norman Foster's bureau with Space Group, Swedish architect Gert Wingord, and OMA. Wingord became the winner, and the OMA bureau, on the contrary, dropped out of the race before submitting the project - "to the great disappointment of the jury."
The new 3,500-employee building will be built on the existing Statoil campus in Forus, a suburb of Stavanger. In the future, two more buildings for 2,000 workers each can be added to it, and only then, perhaps, the existing headquarters will be demolished. The Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper estimates the budget for the first of the new buildings at 2.5-3 billion Norwegian kroner (from 304 to 364.6 million euros), while the customers do not name the possible cost.
Wingord's project, submitted to the competition under the meaningful motto E = mc2, was liked by the jury for the efficient distribution of usable areas, potential compliance with the PassivHaus standard and a well-visible, "iconic" appearance: from the north, the egg-shaped building reaches a height of 16 floors, and from the south - only just one. The architect proposes to install solar panels and plant shrubs on the resulting beveled plane of the "roof-facade". But one cannot fail to notice that the building in Stavanger, although it is located at the main base of Statoil, is significantly inferior in "symbolism" to the headquarters of this company in Oslo, built according to the project of a-lab bureau.
Snøhetta Project "Walk in the Park"
SANAA and Helen & Hard project "Geology of Mind"
Project by Norman Foster and Space Group Cambia Siempre (Eternally Changing)
