What if a school could be more than just a place for education? What if it became the heart of a community, a space for connection, creativity, and shared experiences? These questions are central to the work of James Dodson, founder of SPINN Arkitekter. Over the past 13 years, SPINN has played a central part in the way educational spaces are designed in Norway, turning them into multifunctional hubs that reflect the needs of the people they serve.
We sat down with James to explore his insights into his experience shaping educational architecture, and the philosophy behind SPINN Arkitekter’s approach to creating schools that serve as both learning environments and vital community spaces. Our conversation also delved into the challenges of working with government clients, the evolving priorities in Norwegian architecture, and the innovative ways schools can adapt to meet the needs of both present and future generations.
— Thank you, James, for taking the time to do the interview. First of all, we’d like to hear a bit about yourself.
— I am an American architect living in Norway for some 30 years. I came here to work for Snøhetta who are probably the most well-known Norwegian architecture office worldwide, and I came because I fell in love with the design of the Alexandria library in Egypt, which was very unique at the time and inspired me to apply for a job. So, I came to Norway in 1994 as an intern, finished school in the States, came back and basically stayed!
I worked for 13 years at Snøhetta on international, cultural, and public projects mostly, and started SPINN Arkitkter in 2012. We have a focus on educational buildings and it’s not every day that you can build a cultural building like an opera or a theater. But schools are cultural buildings and have the same components while being very important in small places around Norway. So, we wanted to focus on that!
— Thank you, that’s a very interesting journey. So, having established SPINN almost 13 years ago, could you give us an overview of your experience with designing educational buildings?
— Sure! SPINN started in 2012, and we had one school building, a competition I had won at my previous office called Mesterfjellet School, which is our first school design. We had that project in collaboration with some Danish Architects named CEBRA and that was our first school building. The competition started in 2011, and the project finished in 2014, so we have been building schools ever since we started, basically, some 12 years ago. Myself, I have been working with school buildings for the last 16-17 years, mostly. We have designed and built some of the largest CLT (Cross Laminated Timber) or wooden structure schools in Norway – everything from elementary schools to high schools as well as some University buildings.
Of course, we don’t just work with schools, but we have kindergartens, a lot of sports buildings which often are connected to schools, and we have quite a few schools with specialized cultural stages with seating from 250 seats up to 700 seats. So proper theaters that are built as part of the projects. For me, schools represented a chance to work with larger buildings that are important to the community, buildings that often have a high environmental focus, and they’re often complex!
Schools in Norway are usually not just a school: it is a school, it is a daycare, it has music and art lessons at night, and they combine many functions into a school. We also have a school that is a library, a sports hall, a swimming center, a healthcare center, all in one building. So, schools in Norway are generally multi-function buildings, which I find interesting!
— Well, I am sure you probably have a lot of personal favorites, but if you had to choose one of the most notable educational projects which you have designed, could you give us a glimpse into that? What makes it really unique and special? And at the same time, we would really like to know a bit more about the philosophy of SPINN when it comes to your approach!
Of course, it is hard to pick favorites, but I guess Mesterfjellet! It is our first, so it’s like a baby but we also used that project to try out some new things that were not done very often in Norwegian school buildings. At the time, there was this general idea that school buildings needed to be low so that they weren’t scary. But with only two floors it takes a lot of space, and on the side, you get a lot of long corridors.
The schools up until then, were kind of like a donut with a central space in the middle, but the problem was that, that space didn’t have any daylight, it didn’t have any views outside. So, it was a very introverted space. In our case, we had a complex site with an existing building that we had to connect to, so instead of making the usual fat donut on the ground, we wanted to turn it up on its side. Thus, you get this space in the middle that can actually look out. So, when you look at the pictures for Mesterfjellet, you see that it has got this giant glass window, and every floor is connected to that and the circulation to the middle of the space is really special. So, we kind of took this diagram and changed it by breaking the rules that schools needed to be two or three floors.
Mesterfjellet 1-10 School And Family Centre / CEBRA + Various Architects + SPINN Arkitekter | ArchDaily
In terms of our philosophy, we believe that the playground or the outdoor space is also important. By minimizing the building’s footprint, making it taller, you get several benefits: you get more and better outdoor space. Having also a more compact building is more energy efficient as you have less roof.
The roof is the worst part of the building when it comes to energy. At the same time, if you make this central space, then you get these zones where students from different years and different classes can meet instead of them just staying out in their little arms of a long flat building. Hence, you get a chance to interact. So, by placing the school’s special rooms like the Art and Science rooms, for example, around this vertical core, then you get a very different kind of school than what was being made when we started.
— But speaking of innovation: a few months ago, I was passing by the Voldsløkka school which is really unique and seems to be very advanced technologically. Could you give a few insights on innovative design elements especially pertaining to technology, and explain your main areas of focus and concern in relation to this field?
— There are several things there. First, like I said, the municipalities in Norway have an environmental program that they must follow. They are trying to lead in making environmentally responsible buildings. So, we have the opportunity to make buildings with different innovations each time. Hence, we like to start each project and think: What are we going to do in this project? Maybe it is something new or something different.
Mesterfjellet had this kind of vertical courtyard, while if you look at Bamble upper secondary school, it has a swimming hall, and then two sports halls stacked on top of each other, which is very unusual. At the time, it was our largest wooden construction building. So, there, we were innovating with wooden structure, a highly insulated building using natural ventilation. Also, again this idea of saving space on the side by stacking these two, having big halls on top of each other.
Bamble school complex — SPINN
If you take Voldsløkka, for example, we had a very clear order from the municipality (kommune) that it was to be Oslo’s first “plus building”: a building, which generates more energy in its lifetime than it uses. And there, when we came to the project, the site had been picked where the building was supposed to be, and the volume was also in place.
So, it was this exciting project where we were keeping this old existing structure and building a new school, and it was supposed to be a plus building. So, there, we really wanted to do something different with the facade. Not just make this black monolithic solar panel building, which, we could have done, but that really didn’t fit the program. So, in addition to rehabilitating the old building up to modern standards, we have a building that has a hybrid structure with part of it being steel and part of it being wood. And then, we also have the skin of solar panels on the outside that are parametrically generated to create the necessary amount of energy.
Voldsløkka School and Cultural Station — SPINN
But we also wanted to play with this facade and break up these long lines you normally get on a school building or office building and make something that stands out. Now, it has become quite a controversial building, but the students and the teachers are all very happy with this!
— It is really interesting - you mention that municipalities have certain goals, and we are really interested about the structure of the Norwegian educational building market. At least from an outsider’s perspective, private schools do not seem to constitute a large part of schooling in Norway. Therefore, who are the primary clients for educational architecture firms? Are there private investors involved or is this a field where the government and municipalities account for the majority of business?
— We work almost entirely for government clients, be it city government or county or national government, and there is a division in a sense: each city or municipality is responsible for the 1st-10th grade schools (for elementary and middle schools up to 10th grade).
Then, the high school is the responsibility of the county (fylke), so it is a strange mix. In Oslo, you have both of those things combined so it is also a little bit different in that regard. But in most smaller places or outside of Oslo, you have one client for the 1st-10th grade schools, and another client for the high schools. And then when it comes to universities or higher education, then you have a different client, once again, a national client, or a university client.
— So, there’s definitely a mix within the various levels of governance! But how has the demand for innovative and progressive educational architecture progressed throughout the recent past years?
— When you look around at what other countries or places are doing, I think that, in general, the Norwegian schools are innovative in the way that they are working towards getting away from the old idea that you have one teacher and one class. Instead, they are trying to have teams of teachers that work together, and the classes can be divided up in different ways, according to what their needs are and/or what subjects are being taught.
So, in the 17 years that I have been working with schools in Norway, there has definitely been a change. There is a school reform roughly every 10 years that comes with a new program, or a new way of teaching, or tries to update to new ideas. So, the buildings have to change as well. But really what this means, and this is really important for us, is that we know that we’re going to build schools that are going to last for 60 years, hopefully longer! Within those 60 years, the way of teaching is going to change. A lot of times, as soon as we start the buildings, by the time it is finished, it has already changed a little bit.
And we want to provide a series of different sized rooms that allow them to do different things. There was a trend for a while, back before my time, where you had these open schools in Norway with almost 100 kids and one giant room. Very quickly, they figured out that it wasn’t going to work; it was too noisy, they couldn’t concentrate. They went back towards traditional classrooms, a small room, 60-70 m2, one teacher, 25 kids.
While now, the trend is leaning towards a series of rooms of different sizes. You may still have classrooms, even though you don’t call them “classrooms”, you have a base room that is 60 to 90 m2, and then a series of smaller rooms, large group rooms, smaller group rooms, where you can break out. We are very interested in using this lack of corridors: you have space where you can also break out; you can use that for seating areas.
Kårvåg School — SPINN, Norsk Byggebransje
For example, Kårvåg barneskole is one of our projects that has these very nice little pieces of seating furniture out in the hallway, so that can be used by the kids outside the classroom. We try to make every square meter count - every square meter of the school should be used for teaching or reading or study or socializing!
— I’m sure, however, that this need for generality and longevity is far from simple! Are there any specific challenges that you face as a result or due to working with governmental and municipal actors?
— There’s always politics. When building school buildings, which is something that takes a long time, you may have one group of politicians that believe in, and want, one kind of building at the start. Then perhaps this changes during the school’s life or while we are designing it, before it’s finished. That can definitely cause challenges. At the same time, the budget is never unlimited. Of course, schools in Norway have good budgets but it is never really unlimited, often being quite tight while you want to get as much out of it as possible.
Additionally, we face a lot of challenges in making the area compact, finding good circulation essentially, making sure it is secure – schools are complicated buildings. Especially when you start having lots of functions, when you want to do different things at different times of the day.
— This certainly raises an interesting dynamic which begs the question: how much influence does the type of client have in the final design? And do they wish for complete innovation or are they more conservative than you would have liked them to be?
It is very different with each project. On the one end, you have the City of Oslo, which is a very professional organization; I think they are the largest property organization in Norway. They have a very clear regime and a very clear way that they want things. And on the other hand, you also have small municipalities that maybe haven’t built a school for 30 years. Nobody alive there remembers what happened the last time they built a school. So, those are two very different kinds of clients, and we get different kinds of interactions with them. Ultimately, though, I think both are fun!
Perhaps, there is more flexibility and more possibility to experiment in the smaller places, but one also experiences that the project is also very influenced by the person who is planned to be the principal of the school – they may have very, very strong feelings about how they want things to be, and they get a lot of say. And in some cases, you might experience that you had one principal during the planning of the school and then a different one getting the job when the school is built, and that can sometimes lead to interesting conflicts.
— Wow! I come from a completely different context, and I would have never thought that a principal would hold this much sway in how a school would look in its final form!
— It has to do with the way it is organized: the way they want to organize their teachers, the kind of culture do they want to build. The national guidelines are very round. There are guidelines, obviously, and you have to follow the rules. But it is quite personal and very different the way each school is ran and organized as a team. So, yes, the principals are very important in the projects, and it is one of the things that is kind of fun for us because we don’t find ourselves doing the same thing over and over. Each project is unique!
— Each project is definitely unique! And that uniqueness, I imagine, translates into some interesting trends in school design. We would be interested, in your experience and in your view, what are the trends that you are currently observing in terms of school construction in Norway?
— There was a period from when we started in 2012, up until maybe the pandemic in 2020, where there was a very clear trend of making wooden structure for schools, which as a way to reduce CO2 is great. So, there was definitely a trend, a push to make schools wooden. We have built maybe 12 or 13 schools out of wooden structure. And then, as the prices went up and the products got harder to get, the concrete industry has worked very hard to make better concrete so that it had lower CO2.
But we have seen again, a pendulum swinging back the other way maybe. Now, we are seeing a mix: we have some schools in wood being built at the same time as we have more traditional steel and concrete buildings, but with a focus on low CO2, a focus on energy, a focus on the use of recycled steel, and circularity has, of course, become a big theme in new buildings. The question is: can you use pieces of old buildings? Or how will it be when you take the new building and take it apart in 20 or 40 years and put it together somewhere else?
At SPINN, our focus is on making buildings with a high level of generality, like I said. And we think that that means they will also be able to be used for other functions. There has been a lot of talk in the newspapers in Norway that a lot of schools are closing down. If the kommune has many small schools, they are closing them and putting them in one larger school. But what do you do with old school buildings? A lot of them can be used and a lot are bad.
So, we are very focused on this idea. We even have a project going, where we are testing some of our buildings by drawing in elderly housing, inside of our schools to see what would happen in 60 years or in 40 years if they need more elderly housing than schools, which is a trend that is coming, I'm afraid.
— Apart from materials also in terms of future trends and beyond your focus on generality, of course, regarding demand, is there an observable trend concerning the internal organization and spatial arrangement of schools?
— I think, of course, nobody knows what the future brings, right? So, I think the trends that we are still seeing is that in smaller cities, there is a focus on the school building having multiple functions: that it serves as a civic center, a theater, a music school, a gathering place, maybe it has some other functions connected to it, like a kindergarten or even an elderly center. So, I think a trend is this idea that with limited funds, when a city needs to make a building, it should do multiple things at once.
Then, in the bigger cities, there is, and there has long been, a trend for schools to be getting larger and larger because of the idea that you need more and more specialized teaching. You need a science or math teacher with a higher degree, and it is hard to have that at every single little school; one teacher doesn’t have the knowledge to teach all of these subjects at a high level. So, gathering teachers into larger schools has definitely been a trend for quite some time now.
Finally, I think finding good solutions for how to have good teachers and keep some of the smaller local schools and places, is something that will become the focus in the future, as we are probably building fewer newer, large schools, and finding ways to use existing buildings in better ways. So, that might be a trend that’s coming – that there will be fewer newer, large buildings and a more extensive reuse of existing buildings.
February 2025
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