Striking a chord.

A nursery for hospital staff creates a private world that offers a strong yet multivalent framework in which children can take their first steps between home and society.

The staff nursery at Stensby district hospital in Akershus county seven miles north of Oslo is one of the latest additions to the distinguished Scandinavian tradition of making gentle and imaginative buildings for children. Like most of its kind, the hospital is a large and rather impersonal complex and Kristin Jarmund, the architect, decided to make the nursery into a separate children's area, sheltered from the big buildings by high embracing walls. These layer to form a generous but permeable oval which breaks open to the woods on the south and west. These have clearings for little gardens, playhuts and bike tracks.

The school building itself is a long thin chord across the oval. It caters for four infant groups, each of which has a very particular territory. These are expressed to the south by the volumes of group spaces that project through the predominantly glazed long south-facing wall. The volumes are all different: a rectangle, a drum, a trapezoid and half an apse. Each is in a different colour, that Jarmund describes as 'primary', though they are in fact rather different: crushed strawberry, lime and so on, rather too sweet for my taste, though certainly cheerful and friendly. The spaces between the group rooms are visual extensions of the inner playrooms, partly sheltered by a continuous metal canopy.

The group territories are linked by a long corridor that tapers at each end because of the curve of the north wall. This is penetrated by a cross axis which contains the entrance, and a little upper storey for the staff. As it approaches the southern side of the building, the axis forms a sunny and generous common area that looks south between the group spaces.

The two storeys act as a signal of entrance, and their white rendered block walls are relieved by touches of the colours used on the south front; these denote moments like the main door and the stair of the slide. The fenestration is carefully studied to frame views for both children and adults in many different ways, from small square openings to generous slots.

Throughout, there is a carefully controlled interplay of events giving a very dense lattice of particular places, each of them memorable and reassuring. It provides a strong yet tender framework in which little children can take their first steps into society.