haaf_verk

Transforming a dam into a monastic structure.

The project engages with the 1927 Svartavatn buttress dam as an already complete and powerful construction, shaped by pressure, scale, and geological time. Rather than transforming the dam, the proposal joins an existing architectural and infrastructural conversation, working with the dam’s inherent pathos to support new inhabitation.

Spaces for dwelling, work, and ritual are inserted within the dam’s hollow concrete body, following the existing buttress geometry and load paths. By lowering the reservoir water level by five centimeters, approximately 100,000 tons of hydrostatic pressure are removed from the structure. This reduction compensates for structural interventions while maintaining the dam’s primary role as a retaining system.

The chapel becomes the project’s critical space, both structurally and conceptually. Because any intervention reduces the dam’s capacity, the chapel also functions as an overflow condition directly connected to the reservoir. At high water levels the chapel becomes inaccessible, while at lower levels water may enter the space. Ritual is therefore conditioned by natural forces rather than architectural control, reframing religion as a negotiated relationship with landscape, pressure, and time.

By working with an already monumental structure rather than imposing form, the project seeks to borrow the dam’s gravity and achieve something larger than the intervention itself. The architecture gains meaning through participation in forces beyond the author.