The greenest stone is the stone you do not have to move. On most of our rural sites, there is already more of it lying around than the building will ever need.
Norwegian farmland is full of old stone. Field clearance walls, collapsed byre foundations, the cairns that farmers built when they cleared a meadow by hand. On the Lofoten site that became Låven, the excavation for the new foundations alone turned up enough slate and gneiss to face every retaining wall on the plot. Buying stone from a quarry two hundred kilometres away would have been strange.
Reuse takes planning, though. Before any machine arrives we walk the site with the groundworker and mark the stone worth keeping with spray paint. It is lifted and stacked by size, not tipped into a heap. We draw the walls around what is actually there, measuring the pile rather than specifying a coursing pattern from a catalogue. That means accepting some irregularity, which in a mountain landscape is usually the point.
The skills matter most. At Låven the walls were built by Knut Bergsland, a dry stone waller from Vestågøy who learned from his grandfather. He works slowly and talks to the stone. He also told us, politely, that two of our drawn wall heights were wrong for the material, and he was right.
The result is a building that looks as though it has always been there, because in a sense part of it has. The slate by the front door carries the lichen it grew on the old field wall.
Written by Eirik Fjellheim, founding partner.
