Jøssingfjord is a place heavily altered by humankind, and it is these transformations that give it its exceptional value.

The Jøssingfjordsenteret assumes its fully artificial character and is therefore linked to the infrastructure networks and placed in the landscape as if it were one of them. But it also establishes a link with the rocks, the cliffs and the stony mountains that are the birthplace of mining in Sokndal.

This stony character of the centre is embodied in its exterior construction, in facades and roofs, entirely of polished black concrete, which time and weather will alter and bring to life. The concrete will have a mixture of black, green and white solids, so that it will appear metallic, shiny at times, like a large wet rock. In this way, the pieces that make up the museum are of an intense materiality, heavy and firm, blending in with the nature of the mountain and “disordered” in equilibrium with the randomness of the rocks of a rocky outcrop. But, at the same time, its construction without edges or intersections gives it an abstract, sophisticated and cultured immateriality, like a composition by Joel Shapiro.

The Hellerenhusene is of exceptional beauty, not only because of its historical value, but also because of the paradox in which the immense black, heavy, unchanging and unbalanced mass of the mountain above it is contrasted with the extreme delicacy of its coloured wooden construction. And it is on this edge between the light and the heavy, between the solid and the precarious that they find their greatest power and their magnetising appeal.

The Jøssingfjordsenteret exploits this gravitational condition of the Hellerenhusene, also in a paradoxical way. The senteret is constructed as a set of pieces elevated on a horizontal tray, so that they appear to float weightlessly despite their heavy, stony character.