Heaven and earth: the almost pantheistic tradition of Northern churches is continued in this reinterpretation of our times.

Inside Jensen & Skodvin's church at Mortensrud, the world seems turned upside down. A heavy masonry wall hovers over a transparent base; the usual progression in a building of mass to lightness, dark to light is completely subverted. Powerfully so, for the church continues the brilliant Scandinavian Lutheran tradition of making numinous spaces that are intimately connected to landscape, fusing ritual and experience of natural, celebrating God-made and artefact. The inversion of normal architectonic expectation is not just wilful, but has immense importance for the nature of space and experience. In some of the best new Lutheran churches, the sky is perhaps too dominant, glare can be a severe problem: even reading a prayer book can sometimes be quite difficult. At Mortensrud, the connection of humanity and nature is celebrated subtly in many dimensions.

On a ridge of the glacier-scraped Oslo countryside, the church has been made to the most minimal of specifications -- the budget did not allow more than the average cost per square metre of social housing in the city. The architects have celebrated the site. As many trees as possible have been preserved. Untouched glaciated rocks are allowed to rise through the concrete floor of the church and the gentle sloping parvis that connects it to the parish hall.

A simple, almost agricultural steel shed has been transformed into a sacred space. Steel beams carry the drystone upper walls that are themselves enclosed in glass skins. Light pierces through the heaviness of the stone, but never enough to be blinding -- the effect is not dissimilar to that of some mosques where domes are made heaven-like by small glass cups, making the upper part of the interior sparkling yet gentle. At pew level, glass walls allow interior and exterior, man's place and God's nature, to flow together without glare. The pitched roof itself is very much an expression of industrialized agricultural vernacular -- perhaps a contemporary middle-class metaphor of the stable in Bethlehem.

The strange stone walls of the church are made by inserting horizontal steel plates a metre apart welded to the columns and to help bear the loads of the masonry. From the plates, brackets project to support and stiffen the external glass skin. The architects say that they have achieved their effects at such economy mainly by avoiding conventional "proprietary" systems for facades, structures, walls, floors ... Rather we used very basic methods and techniques and surprisingly found out, again and again, that not only was it cheaper it also gave us far greater architectural freedom'. The result is a triumph of economy, and a distinguished contribution to the very fine tradition of modern sacred spaces in Scandinavia.

The parish hail is more clumsy than the church, and after debate, the jury decided that its execution prevented this very inventive and sensitive complex from getting an award, though all were happy to recommend it for high commendation.

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Jensen & Skodvin Arkitektkontor, Oslo, Norway

Project team

Jan Olav Jensen, Annelise Bjerkan, Torstein Koch, Torunn Golberg, Borre Skodvin, Einar Malrnquist, Siri Moseng, Vibeke Jenssen

Photographs

Jan Olav Jensen, Jiri Havron, Per Berntsen