Transforming Architecture

“Taking possession of the environment implies structuring the world into spaces by means of thresholds and places.”

hess|hoen

Contact

 If you would like to get in touch with hess|hoen, please contact your nearest office.

Norway

HessHoen AS

Maridalsveien 3, bygg 17

0178 Oslo

Director: Paul Anders Hoen

paul@hesshoen.no

mob: +47 45022277

 

Sydney

HessHoen

Level 1, 17 Roylston Street

Paddington, Sydney 2021

NSW, Australia

Director: Brian Hess

brian@hesshoen.com

mob: +61 412425797

 

About

hess|hoen embraces the disciplines of the built environment. With offices in Sydney (Australia) and Oslo (Europe) we provide professional and creative services to a diverse range of clients, locally and internationally. We have built our reputation as an astute office, offering sophisticated and inspirational design, facilitating fruitful collaboration. The studio is kept intentionally boutique in size to allow absolute focus on the client and their success.

We believe great ideas are not born in isolation; rather they are consequences of fruitful collaborations between people and across professions. As creative individuals we have a genuine thirst for knowledge and a desire to constantly improve our skills as designers and communicators.

Ancora Imparo we have borrowed from Michelangelo and means “I am still learning”. To us it is an inexhaustible source of aspiration and for ingenious thinking.

Our design process is founded on two realms; intelligibility and sensibility. We seek a seamless transition between the two, and the results are projects where clarity, simplicity and precision are unified with emotion, awareness and responsiveness. Through functionality and materiality, and a clear understanding of how people experience 3D space, we aim to celebrate a binary structure in a holistic and practical way.

 

I get so sentimental when I see how perfect perfection can be.

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Transforming Architecture

hess|hoen transforms architecture.

We transform the same place into a  different space.

We specialize in adaptive reuse; described as the process of adapting old structures for purposes other than those initially intended, or modernized to meet today’s criteria.

Our success is based on a holistic and practical way of defining space. We encourage our clients to think differently about meanings and the significance of space, and those related concepts that compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life; place, construction, surface and transition. In encouraging clients to think differently, it is not suggested that they reject their old and familiar ways of thinking about space and spatiality, but rather that they question them in new ways that are aimed at opening up and expanding the extent and critical sensibility of how architecture defines space.  

A place can be empirically located, but it takes a qualitative understanding of space to make a building that is capable of satisfying human beings in their mental, spiritual and physical lives. This qualitative understanding involves, firstly, the comprehension and then the delineation of the three spaces defined by a building; the inside space, the outside space and the third space.

The third space becomes present when an inside and an outside are delineated. By ‘present’ we mean that it can be both physically perceived and have wider significance for the practical and aesthetic construction of the building. Invariably, good solutions to architectural design problems lie in the intelligent and sensitive use of the all-important third space.

Both the inside and the outside are only recognizable by the existence of the third space. They are all integral elements that cannot exist apart from each other.  Most people are familiar with inside and outside space, but fail to be aware of the third space because they can only see the first two spaces. This means that they are ‘blind’ to the building as a meaningful whole. All events in a building, and the transitions that take place between these events, require a place that is qualitatively understood as the intersection of these three spaces.

The transition in moving between the inside and the outside brings with it emotional tension. This tension is at its greatest pitch when at the threshold between these two spatial opposites, creating a third place distinct from the other two. It is important to keep in mind that this tense interaction between the three spaces of a building is the very ‘tool’ of the successful architect in allowing the inhabitants to enact events that transform space into their place.