God in the details.

Sola is in Jaer, that windswept and strangely flat part of south-west Norway, which still retains a very strong local identity (AR August 1996, p38). Its church dates back to the first part of the twelfth century and is one of the first stone places of worship in the whole country (the first timber stave churches are a little earlier). It was a far flung little crest of the great Romanesque tidal wave that had swept over the whole of Europe during the previous 100 years. It stands next to the sea in the bare fields, on a roughly flat and square platform raised from the surrounding landscape by rough stone banks and walls.

Over the years, with changes in faith and population, the little grey church by the sea has been through many vicissitudes. The tower at the west end was allowed to fall down in the seventeenth century, and by the nineteenth, the church had been deconsecrated and was used as an artist's studio. In the Second World War, the Germans demolished most of what remained because its precise east-west orientation was used by British bomber pilots as a means of locating Sola military airfield.

Louis Kloster won the limited competition for rebuilding the church as a place of worship that could recall traces and memories of the past. The Romanesque church was remade, stone by stone, from the one and a half metre high walls that were left after the German destruction. Kloster undertook much research and used generations of masons' marks on the stones, existing surveys and sketches to recreate the walls as authentically as possible. Where no stones could be found, he used glass blocks for instance in the peak of the west gable. These clearly show the difference between ancient and modern, and allow more light into the space.

Although the walls have largely been built to re-create old work, Kloster has totally rejected any attempt to make some kind of facsimile of the original. The new roof structure is in fine great oak timbers and boards, but at the ridge there are continuous strips of glazing, forming a streak of light that re-emphasises the powerful east-west axis, and in a strange and almost pagan way turns it round from east to west so that its direction seems to be from the altar along the luminous line of the roof, out through the great west arch, through the vestigial remains of the tower, then out and onwards until it meets that other shimmering line between sky and sea.

In less sensitive hands such a gesture might have seemed hackneyed or gross, but at Sola the strategem is executed with such understated refinement, attention to detail and understanding of materials that it seems natural, calm and unpretentious. The toughened glass that seals the west arch is both applied externally (almost like Lewerentz at Klippan) or mounted in slots cut in the rubble. The other wall openings are treated similarly. The fine-honed glazing bars forming the ridge-light are of bronze, continuing the use of that splendid material from the large plates that cover the rest of the roof.

As Kloster says, 'this church was in its earliest years a closed room covered from the weather, a place for contemplation and worship. Today it has become a richer space, in contact with the elements and our greatly extended understanding of the universe'. He is right, and has re-found, for us in our day, the spiritual dimension of this ancient place.