Danish practice Henning Larsen Architects has triumphed over two other stellar Scandinavian firms — BIG and White Arkitekter — to secure a significant new commission in the Swedish city of Lund. Forum Medicum will form a key part of Lund University’s drive toward a modern, collaborative academic environment uniting a wide variety of functions within the medical faculty within a single, distinctively shaped volume.
The 270,000-square-foot facility is arranged around an indoor plaza that will be accessible to the public — incorporating a café, restaurant, and informal gathering spaces that connect the interior with external public spaces. The upper stories of the building’s large, rectilinear volume is rotated 45 degrees — akin to the twisting of architect Ernö Rubik’s famous “Rubik’s Cube” — to create recreational rooftop terraces and sheltered patios with seating below the resulting cantilevers.
The formal rotation evoking Rubik’s classic puzzle is echoed by a twist in programmatic conventions inside the Forum. Henning Larsen has tapped into a growing trend for the creation of flexible environments in commercial and institutional buildings designed to foster incidental meetings across disciplines and allow collaboration to occur, naturally. Like HOK’s new Apple campus in the Silicon Valley, Calif., and Frank Gehry’s Facebook headquarters, the open-plan interiors of the Forum can be adapted at a later date based on the changing needs of its inhabitants.
“The solution meets the development of the space with great elegance and a structural idea that will be transferable to many other project types,” said representatives of the medical faculty explaining their recommendation of Henning Larsen for the project. “The architecture is varied and simple while expressing lightness — an impressive deed when taking the size of the building into consideration.”
As well as rooms for teaching and academic research, the Forum houses space for exhibitions, conferences, and events that help share the facility’s activities with the wider public. This drive to unite the institution with the people of Lund is encapsulated by the literal transparency of the building volume: floor-to-ceiling glazing offers a visual connection between inside and out and transforms the Forum into an urban beacon after dark.
For more information and images on the latest projects by Henning Larsen Architects, explore their firm profile, here.
