The Gatehouse provides an opportunity to rethink the University’s relationship with the broader community. The location of Grensen, at the ‘border’, metaphorically and physically speaks to ideas of transition, integration, and a larger sense of coming together. For these reasons, our proposal seeks to look at the site as a community hub that not only serves the students but also the residents, enlivening the area and contributing to a melting pot of activities. By creating the space to inhabit ‘the border’, we replace the perception of the institution as something distinct from its context, with a ‘village’ where human encounter encourages the dissemination of knowledge.

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By creating a living lab that brings together and fosters new artistic and educational practices, we aim to design a new activity heart that fuses the university campus with the local surroundings and extends a network into the greater urban environment.

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While promoting more programming on the site, the proposal acts as a flagship model for future development to centralized NTNU on the hill of Gløshaugen. This considers the existing buildings and what they can offer to create more efficiency and future-proof flexibility for space allocation. As an underlying principle, we aim to keep the exterior of existing buildings as they are, allowing heritage to inform progress. This is not only for sustainability purposes but also to preserve the idea of a neighborhood on the site that uses each building as a node in the overall network of activity.