Builders’ Hut, 2025

Builders’ Hut is an experimental design-and-build studio that took place in spring 2025 at Kjødehallen. It was initiated by Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) in collaboration with USF and Bergen Assembly, with the aim of imagining and developing new uses for the hall and its adjacent pier. It draws on the concept of ‘Open Form’, a design approach that pays close attention to what is already present by giving form to new adaptations, Builders Hut set out to contribute to the transformation of Kjødehallen, reimagining its potential as a flexible, shared space open to a diverse range of uses and cultural actors.

Working with found and recycled materials, students and teachers foregrounded questions of reuse and sustainability, and an ethics of slowness, paying close attention to the material histories and properties of everything they used. The studio operated on the model of the medieval builders’ hut as both workshop and school: a space for experimentation and education. Participants collectively mapped the site in detail, designed and built hybrid objects, and installed key elements such as a mobile kitchen, flexible seating, gathering areas and divisions. Combining practical construction with critical discussion about ‘Open Form’ and collective authorship, Builders Hut continuet to develop on the groundwork for a more extensive use of Kjødehallen — imagining new ways to share and inhabit the site well into the future.

Builders’ Hut was a masters-level design-and-build course at Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) grounded in the school’s long-standing philosophy of ‘Open Form’ — an understanding of architecture as an unending process of continual adaptation. Originally developed in Poland by Oskar Hansen, and further explored with Sofia Hansen in response to the rigid principles of modernism and their implementation in the Eastern Bloc, Open Form was later introduced and adapted at BAS by founder Svein Hatløy, shaping the school’s tradition of situated, critical, and collaborative practice. In spring 2025, Builders Hut brought this approach into direct encounter with the specific context of Kjødehallen at USF. Through a collaborative process of mapping, debating, prototyping, and making together, the course explored the multiple histories, resources, and cultural ambitions of the site. The material result is a series of shared infrastructures and spatial interventions designed to enable endlessly flexible possibilities for the hall’s future occupation.