AR Future Projects Winner 2024

We are excited to announce that Tårnkvartalet, designed by Haptic and PIR2, has been chosen as the overall winner of this year’s AR Future Projects awards, as well as picking up the award for Education! We are very grateful to our visionary client, the municipality of Bærum, for entrusting us with this important piece of civic architecture.

Located in Fornebu, Norway, the Tårnkvartalet proposal will co-locate a secondary school for over 900-students with wider community amenities including a cultural centre, black box theatre, sports centre, library, health clinic, and skate park, alongside workshops and cafés, in a 16,000m2 civic hub. The scheme also includes a voluminous amphitheatre at its centre, facing onto a new civic square, via a large ‘hangar door’ opening. The school is designed to be placemaking device. Reinventing the school, creating not just a place of learning, but a centre of civic and cultural life for the whole community in one of Europe’s largest urban developments.

Comments from the judges include:

‘Tårnkvartalet sets the standard for extremely successful and beautiful educational spaces.’ Anjulie Rao

‘The building represents a powerful precedent for how schools can serve a dual role for both education
and culture.’ Julia King

‘This is a stand-out project: the life of the city condensed in a single building.’ Christopher Lee