Small-scale Thinking

Architect Todd Saunders wants to change the way we approach hospitality design from the ground up.

- Rachel Gallaher

IN 2002, THE Norwegian Public Roads Administration contacted a young Bergen-based architect with an invitation that would change his career. Twenty years earlier, the government agency had introduced a programme to attract more tourists to 18 scenic routes around the country. Part of the plan included commissioning works from artists and architects that would draw visitors to Norway’s rural areas, boosting local economies and relieving tourism-related crowding in larger cities.

The group was now looking at Todd Saunders, an emerging architect primarily known for his residential work, to participate in a design competition for its latest installation. He had launched his namesake firm less than 5 years prior but was already labelled as one to watch for his inventiveness, attention to siting and landscape, and Scandinavian-modern aesthetic. (Saunders was born in Newfoundland but has lived in Bergen since the mid-1990s.) Accepting the invitation to design a piece for a bucolic location about 3 hours east of Bergen, Saunders worked with fellow architect Tommie Wilhelmsen on Aurland Lookout—a dramatic woods-viewing structure that stretches nearly 30m over a dense grove of pine trees.

“The work I do now, which I call destination architecture, started with the Aurland project,” Saunders says of the elegant lakefront observation platform that lets visitors walk out over a mountainside. “Once we did this tourist (stop), we started to do similar projects, which led to Fogo Island Inn. I look at my work as destination pieces that attract people to a place. Instead of a city or town, the building is the magnet.”