Atrium House in Gotland, Sweden by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter.

Designed by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, Atrium House is a holiday home in När Parish – the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea. The house was built on a slight ridge that marks the location of the thousand years-old coastline—the edge where the land once met the sea. Emerging camouflaged in the expansive landscape, the building appears more like a low wall than a house. It is built around a completely enclosed atrium courtyard designed to serve as a fixed point, a sheltered outdoor room, while the rest of the property is left undisturbed as a meadow where grazing sheep prevent the land from returning to forest.

The house is inspired by the materiality of Gotland’s vernacular architecture. Another source of inspiration was the remains of a unique square medieval fortress, known as Bulverket, found in the middle of the island’s second-largest lake, Tingstäde Marsh. Like Bulverket, the Atrium House can be described as an austere architectural structure in which the elements required for everyday functions have been reduced to a minimum.

The layout is designed for three generations; a young family with children and their grandmother whose rooms are located diagonally opposite each-other in the two corners, angled away from common spaces such as the living room and kitchen.

The house is narrow, but its openings outward are broad, which gives the interior the character of a sheltered niche in the open space of the landscape. While the roof plane maintains a consistent elevation throughout the house, the interior floor steps up and down in accordance with the surrounding terrain. This means the ceiling height varies among the main spaces, which are arranged in a continuous ring around the atrium.

Atrium House took out 1st prize for a CO2-optimised New Buildings at the ECOLA Awards in Germany in 2012.

[Images courtesy of Tham & Videgård Arkitekter.]