The High North
The Norwegian Barents Secretariat, an organisation devoted to developing relations between Norway and Russia, has outlined plans to build the world’s highest wooden building in the town of Kirkenes on the Arctic border.
The 16-17 storey building will also be CO2-neutral, and is intended to showcase the High North region and the positive relations being fostered in the region. The town has been chosen as the place where Norway and Russia meet.
According to a press release from the Secretary General of the Secretariat, Rune Rafaelsen, said
The new Barents House must be of such significance that people would want to go there from afar to experience the house. It must be an attraction and a landmark which is beyond any other similar building… [It] will function as a lighthouse for the development of the Barents Region and the regional border cooperation in the North [and] will include a number of facilities, among them a library, a theatre and a creative environment for artists, researchers, students and other relevant institutions.
A beacon in the snow
The building is intended to be a monument on more than one level – as well as the physical and aesthetic status of Barents House, it will also act as something of a beacon of positivity, serving to bring people together and raise awareness not only of a remote location, but the people who live there.
Touching on this is the environmentally-friendly nature of the project and the sense that by creating something that is so connected to the landscape that surrounds it, the Secretariat can push people to think more deeply about their own relationships with their surroundings.
The remoteness of this project does not devalue it: it shows that people are reimagining their locales all over the world; there is a constant push to add to the landscape, but in a way that is more meaningful than a show of engineering ingenuity.
Instead, as our interaction with cities and towns changes, and we seek out ways to engage with our locations in new ways, buildings will come to be more than a collection of materials: here, it becomes a way of highlighting issues, of attracting people and standing – literally – above a region to pull together all those who live within.
There are issues here that brands and businesses can learn from:
- Creating spaces that are compelling, innovative and memorable is a way to foster a relationship with people.
- Physical location is still important: despite (or perhaps because of) the emergence of online living, there is still a need to develop the ‘real’ world.
We need to look outside of our own cities and understand better the initiatives that are taking place in more remote, less well-known areas of the globe: by taking a step back, we can see how improvements can be made in our own back yards.
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