Room 01 · Acoustics
A building that answers when you speak to it
Seven rooms, one long corridor, and a wall you can tune like an instrument. The Sounding Room is where visitors learn that architecture has a voice.
We cast the interior shell in a low-density lime aggregate, then milled 4,800 conical wells into its face at varying depth. Each well resonates at a different frequency; walk the length of the room and the reverberation slides down a full octave beneath your feet.
Nothing here is amplified. The material does the work — which is the whole argument of Programme 07.
- Volume412 m³
- RT601.9 s at 500 Hz
- Wells4,812 milled
- OpenedMarch 2025
Room 02 · Material
Every brick carries its own receipt
Fourteen thousand bricks, each stamped with the date it was fired, the quarry it came from, and the kilogram of carbon it cost to make.
The ledger wall is not decoration. Stand close enough and you can read the supply chain of the building you are standing inside — a practice we now require of every commission the studio accepts.
- Units14,220 bricks
- Quarries3 · all <90 km
- Embodied0.21 kg CO₂e / unit
- Stamped byHand, 6 makers
If you cannot say where it came from, you should not be allowed to build with it. Ines Halvorsen, founding partner
Room 03 · Archive
Nine degrees, no daylight, eight hundred drawings
A working archive held at 9 °C and 45 % relative humidity, where the studio keeps its unbuilt work — the competitions lost, the schemes withdrawn, the ideas that arrived twenty years early.
Visitors are issued a wool coat at the threshold and forty minutes on the clock. The discomfort is deliberate: an archive you can linger in is an archive nobody finishes.
- Holdings812 drawings
- Climate9 °C · 45 % RH
- Session40 minutes
- AccessBy appointment
Room 04 · Threshold
Open only between dusk and full dark
The terrace unlocks at civil twilight and closes ninety minutes later. Its single material is polished zinc, chosen because it holds the colour of the sky longer than the sky does.
In midwinter the room is available for eleven minutes. In June it stretches past two hours. The programme is written by latitude, not by us.
- SurfacePolished zinc, 2 mm
- Window11–128 min / day
- Capacity24 standing
- LightingNone fitted
We stopped designing the light and started designing the wait. Programme note, 2025
Room 05 · Practice
The only room where you are handed a tool
A twelve-metre bench, open to the public every Thursday, where the studio's carpenters repair whatever the neighbourhood brings through the door.
Chairs, mostly. Also: a cello case, a 1970s slide projector, eleven bicycles, and one wooden boat that took the better part of a season. Repairs are free; the only cost is that you stay and help.
- Bench12 m, oiled ash
- SessionsThursdays, 14–20h
- Repaired1,304 objects
- FeeYour afternoon
Room 06 · Ground
Planted in the spoil of its own excavation
Nothing left the site. The 1,900 tonnes of clay and gravel dug out for the foundations were graded, layered and sown — a garden that is literally the building turned inside out.
Six years in, the poorest band of subsoil has the richest planting. We did not predict this and have stopped pretending we could.
- Spoil kept100 % · 1,900 t
- Species64 sown, 41 held
- IrrigationRainfall only
- SurveyAnnual, each May
Room 07 · Credits
Who made this, and what it cost
Strata Works is a nineteen-person studio between Aarhus and Kyoto. Programme 07 ran for thirty-one months and was funded without a single sponsor logo on a wall.
- Studio19 people, 2 cities
- Duration31 months
- ContractorsBro & Lind A/S
- PhotographyMira Feldt
- TypesettingSet in the house serif
- Enquiriesrooms@strata.works
Programme 08 — Nine Horizontal Rooms — opens autumn 2026 in Kanazawa. The rack you are reading will be rebuilt on its side.
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