DRDH was awarded the first prize in this open international competition in 2008. The project develops an urban plan for a new cultural quarter in the centre of Bodø, a city in Northern Norway, 100 km inside the Arctic Circle. Within the wider urban strategy the brief asked competitors to place three principal buildings: a concert hall and theatre, a new city library and a small maritime museum. Our project placed the two principal buildings on vacant plots within the existing urban centre, densifying the city and allowing it to become part of the everyday life of its citizens.

The concert hall and the library formed a public space between them, the focus of a proposed cultural promenade that stretched from the existing shopping centre to the harbour and culminated in the museum on the water.

A second competition involved the design of the new Library and Concert Hall, as part of a more focused study on the central area within the proposed Cultural Quarter. The brief developed the original masterplan to invert the relationship between the two buildings. Once again, DRDH was awarded first prize with a project that developed the two buildings as two familial characters, in dialogue with the scale and rhythms of the existing surrounds and with each other across a new urban space. The practice was subsequently commissioned to design both buildings.