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Making Visible Extracted Lithospheric Layers: A Story Set in Stone

A visitor stepping through a torn opening in heavy black cloth, lit from one side, gravel underfoot — Into the installation: walls that close in and break open, as if the mountain were being hollowed out around you.Back to the plan

2026

Exhibition, installation and fieldwork
Master diploma, Bergen School of Architecture

We build for a short time in things that have existed for a very long time.

This exhibition investigates the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and the geological ground they depend on.

It begins beneath the city. Here, the ground is not an empty surface beneath architecture, but a layered and active territory: tunnels, foundations, excavations, deposits, infrastructures and traces of previous interventions accumulate within it. Moving from the urban underground towards the mountain, the project follows these layers outward, from the spaces we construct below the city to the geological matter from which many of them are made.

At the mountain, the scale of intervention changes. Roads and infrastructure require rock to be cut, drilled, removed and displaced. Ancient geological formations become construction material, while the infrastructures built from them may exist for only a fraction of their geological timescale.

The exhibition brings these relationships together through a large scale drawing, a spatial installation and a collection of material and visual research. Rather than presenting a single architectural proposal, the work assembles fragments, cases and processes to reveal the material and temporal systems that architecture participates in but rarely represents.

The project asks what happens when architecture is considered not only as what is built, but as a process of intervention into an already existing world, and what it means to make such interventions visible.

A small figure standing in a dark rock tunnel, light at the far end — The research, and the exhibition

Plan of the existing hall with the installation drawn inside it, labelled: corridor, three dark tunnels, large drawing, shaft, research rooms one and two — Left, the installation inside the existing room. Right, light and shadow along the route, and where each photograph was taken from. Press a number to go to its photograph.

Plan of the installation shaded from dark to light along the route, with numbered arrows showing where each photograph was taken — Left, the installation inside the existing room. Right, light and shadow along the route, and where each photograph was taken from. Press a number to go to its photograph.

Exhibition

Dark section along the route: figures move from a research room past two tall shafts, bend through a low tunnel, walk a lit corridor and reach the round drawing room — Section A-A: the changing spaces along the route, from the research rooms past the shafts to the drawing room.

A wood-panelled room lit by a single lamp, a wall of pinned documents above a table and chair — Research room one: archival material, drawings and documentation on the walls and the table.Back to the plan

A dark opening in black fabric, a blurred visitor stepping into it — The entrance to the first dark tunnel.Back to the plan

A dark room of black fabric with photographs on the walls, plinths, and a heap of gravel on the floor with a booklet on it — Research room two: the two quarries, through film, models, photographs and spatial studies. Photograph: Thor Brødreskift.Back to the plan

Models of grey stone blocks and small structures on dark plinths against black fabric — Models and drawings of the underground landscapes met along the way.Back to the plan

A laptop on a stand and photographs pinned to black fabric above a low table of papers — Film, photographs and research from one of the two quarries.Back to the plan

A blurred visitor walking past a heap of gravel with a folded booklet on it, photographs and benches against black fabric behind — Following the stone: from extraction, through processing, into the wider construction system.

A visitor parting black curtains to step through, photographs of the quarry on the wall beside — The way into the shaft, past the research from the quarry in Fana.Back to the plan

Looking up in a tall, narrow black space, a visitor bending forward at the bottom of the frame — The shaft: half the height of the extraction hall inside the mountain in Fana, with 7 minutes 45 seconds of sound from the site.Back to the plan

A long dark corridor of black fabric, a strip of light along one wall and a visitor far down it — The corridor.Back to the plan

Narrow corridor between walls of black fabric, a strip of light running along one side over a gravel floor — The corridor seen from the other end, where the light never reaches the far wall.Back to the plan

A blurred visitor crossing the round room, a printed mountain landscape curving around the wall above black fabric — The drawing room.Back to the plan

The printed landscape curving around the drawing room, above a black fabric wall and a pale floor — A seven metre section of the underground landscape of Bergen.

Long printed section of mountains in black and grey, with tunnels, halls and buildings cut into the rock — The section, unrolled. Press to open, and again to zoom in.

Black fabric hung between the concrete columns and beams of the existing hall, a line of light along it and gravel spread on the floor — During the deconstruction: the installation seen from outside, in the existing hall.Back to the plan

A long wall of black fabric with a strip of light along it, seen across an empty concrete floor — During the deconstruction.Back to the plan

Research

Stone is one of the most basic materials of the built environment. Crushed into aggregate, it becomes the roads we travel on, the concrete we build with and the foundations under buildings. In Norway, more than 200 quarries extract, crush, sort and send it across the country, and it is now Norway's largest mineral export. At the same time, every road, tunnel and building digs rock out of the ground and carries it somewhere else.

The research follows this movement through two quarries outside Bergen: Arna Steinknuseverk in Ytre Arna and Fana Stein og Gjenvinning in Stendafjellet. At both, stone is blasted out of the mountain and crushed into aggregate, and the halls left behind are filled with contaminated masses and debris from building sites. Through site visits, conversations, mapping and film I followed the stone from the mountain to the construction site, and back again.

Dark relief map of the coast and fjords around Bergen, with lines marking the two quarries: NCC Arna steinknuseverk to the north and Fana stein og gjenvinning to the south — The two sites outside Bergen: NCC Arna steinknuseverk in Ytre Arna, and Fana Stein og Gjenvinning in Stendafjellet.

Diagram in white on black: rock is extracted from the mountain, crushed into aggregate, used in asphalt, concrete and fill, and the voids left behind are filled with contaminated masses and building debris brought back by truck — The cycle: rock leaves the mountain as aggregate, and the voids it leaves are filled with what construction throws away.

Map of Europe with arrows showing aggregate exported from Norway, beside charts of domestic sales, sales value and exports rising from 1987 to 2023 — Aggregate from Norway: where it goes, and how the trade keeps growing.

Frida in a hard hat and high-visibility overalls standing in a concrete tunnel — Fieldwork, inside the mountain.

A dump truck driving through a lit hall blasted out of the rock — Trucks inside the mountain halls.

A heap of blasted rock under the rough ceiling of a mountain hall — Blasted rock.

A crushing plant of steel stairs and conveyors lit yellow inside a rock cavern — A crushing plant, built into the rock.

A heap of grey, cracked slabs of polluted material in a hall inside the mountain — Polluted material, deposited inside the mountain.

A hand holding a scoop of grey gravel above a heap of it — Aggregate.

A wide quarry cut into a hillside, pools of water and heaps of gravel in front — The quarry.

A red truck crossing a bridge through a wooded valley — Rock on the move.

Heaps of rock and rubble on a wet harbour site, an excavator and ships behind — Rock and rubble at the harbour.

White line drawing on black of tunnels and halls branching through the rock — Reconstruction from memory.

Charcoal drawing on black of long wedge-shaped shadows — Shadow drawing.