PARLIAMENTARY PRESCIENCE.

A parliament building for the Lapps (Sami) offers an elegant and powerful figure, redolent with the materials and myths of the North, while technologically appropriate for this century.

Right at the top of Europe, Norway drifts east to meet Russia round the top of Sweden and Finland. This is the country of the Sami, the Lapps, who still pursue their nomadic way of life across the borders of the Scandinavian countries and even into Russia. A low rolling plateau is covered with sparse fir and birch forest; wide rivers flow north to the Barents Sea. In winter, there is no light at all for two months and the temperature can go down to minus 40[degrees]C; in summer, the thermometer can rise to 20, and the sun never sets. The Sami are partly settled now, particularly in winter, and the Norwegian ones have a capital, Karasjok, just west of the Finnish border, and some 100 miles below the North Cape, the most boreal point on the European mainland. The town is largely made up of prefabricated buildings scattered among the trees of the river bank with no urban coherence, apart from the Samelandssenter, a social and tourist focus by Bjerk & Bjorge (AR August 1996).

That complex had a small hail for the Sami Parliament (Sameting), the democratically elected body (founded in 1989) which looks after Lapp affairs. Now, it has been given over entirely to tourism, and there is a much more elaborate building for the Sameting. It has a fine debating chamber for the 39 members, proper facilities for visitors, press and parliamentary officers, as well as a good library and a restaurant for the public. These differing elements are put together in a figure of great power. A two-storey semi-circular arc of accommodation embraces a green public space which looks south-eastwards over the river to the endless landscape. On the west side of this new public forum, is a tall cone covered in rough timber strips; this is the chamber itself, made as a landmark in the wilderness and based on the traditional Lapp tent, the lavvo.

Often, taking a vernacular form and blowing it up to monumental size results in the ridiculous as, for instance, some of the worst American-designed hotels in South-East Asia demonstrate with assiduous vulgarity. But, at Karasjok, the form is so simple and handled with such careful abstraction that there is no question of kitsch. Abstraction is further emphasized by the thin wedge-shaped glass bridge that skewers through the cone, dividing it into the chamber itself and a triple-height anteroom which contains stairs up to the public gallery and down to the underground lecture theatre. Both sides of the slash through the Euclidean figure are glass, filling the two volumes with sky light (in summer). There are no other windows in the cone.

From the outside, the whole complex is reserved, unwelcoming almost, with austerity relieved and given scale only by the rather delicate solar shades over the windows. The curved outer edge is battered (slopes inwards), and clad in irregular strata of horizontal wooden strips, not unlike those used in the upward sense on the cone. A simple porch with an awning almost like a raised tent flap is the only sign of entrance and welcome. Once inside, everything opens out. You look along and across the library to the restaurant, then beyond to the cone and its ice dagger. The architects wanted to make an abstraction of the experience of entering a lavvo, when the outside is impassive, but then you go in through the membrane and everything is clear and displayed.

A long double-height gallery links ground and first floor spaces (offices and conference rooms on the outside of the curve), defines the inside of the arc and connects the whole complex. At the entrance, its power is somewhat muted because the library opens immediately in front and falls in a couple of terraces down to the level of the green court. But as you go round towards the chamber, the gallery's power becomes more clear, for it is the ligament which unites all parts of the place, physically, visually and socially. Its dimensions, and its section, in which first floor circulation becomes a continuous balcony, make it into a generous space in its own right, not just a corridor, but a place for informal meetings, sauntering and contemplation of the cold wastes from the brightly lit cosy warmth of the interior.

The chamber is of course the climactic space. Lined with wood, in a more ordered and joiner-like version of the rough external cladding, the tall space has both intimacy and symbolic dignity (enhanced by Hilde Schanke's fine abstract mural). The tall conical section ensures that the public and press gallery is almost in the middle of the volume, rather than being thrust to the back as is usual. Each member's desk is carefully designed and detailed (the architects working with Beate Ellingsen) to make a personal place within the big volume -- a metaphor of the whole affair, in which individual is continually put in counterpoint with communal, public with semi-private, artefact with nature.

Much money and effort have been expended in trying to make a symbolic place appropriate for a very particular culture in transition. Whether it will work or not depends mainly on what the Sami decide to be. It will be the place in which they make their decisions.