NORDE is a twenty-four-person practice working between Oslo and Zürich. We take on roughly fourteen commissions per year, across private residences, cultural buildings, and adaptive reuse. We reject speculative renderings. Every proposal we present is already structurally resolved, materially sourced, and costed against the site's climate and its client's patience.
"A good building is a long argument with gravity, decided in favor of the earth."
— EIRIK HAUGEN, FOUNDING PARTNER
A 220-square-meter sculpture pavilion built for the Arctic Biennale. Laminated oak frame, triple-glazed façade tuned to polar night.
Private weekend residence embedded into a south-facing schist slope. Thermal mass of exposed concrete walls offsets glazing heat loss.
Primary school planned as five linked pavilions. Passive ventilation via stack effect. Construction waste 4.1% of purchased material.
Working studio for a ceramicist. Charred cedar rainscreen, buried kiln room, north-light clerestory calibrated for color-accurate work.
Prefabricated cross-laminated timber superstructure airlifted by helicopter. Designed to withstand 4-meter snow loads.
Every commission begins with four seasonal site visits. We document existing vegetation, solar angles, soil cores, water-table, wind paths, sightlines from adjacent parcels, and sound profiles.
Before massing or plan, we establish a regional material palette — typically 3 structural and 3 cladding materials sourced within 200 kilometers of site. This constrains everything that follows.
We produce a structurally-resolved massing model before any aesthetic proposal is presented. Our in-house engineer reviews every scheme. Walls must hold themselves up.
We present a single fully-resolved proposal, priced and coordinated. We believe that three half-finished options is a failure to commit, and that clients deserve our conviction.
A partner attends weekly site meetings for every project. We maintain relationships with roughly 40 regional contractors whose craft standards we trust. No project is handed off.
A finite palette forces honesty. Every decision is made against a material we already know intimately.
Across residential, cultural, educational, and adaptive-reuse typologies.
Range: €180,000 (smallest) to €24M (largest).
Against original quoted timeline. Measured across 83 of 87 projects. We publish our delays.
We respond to every serious inquiry within three business days. Speculative requests, competition briefs, and student research queries are all welcomed — just tell us which.