Norra Tornen, built by OMA, is a contemporary architectural work and a unique apartment building, divided into two buildings, Helix and Innovationen, located in Stockholm, Sweden. Opened in 2018, the eastern tower is 125 m tall, consisting of 36 floors. The west tower opened in 2020 and is 110 m tall, with 33 floors. Text by Reinier de Graaf(partner of the project). The Innovationen Tower comprises 182 units ranging from 44 sqm one-bedroom apartments to a 271 sqm penthouse on the top floor, with the majority consisting of two- or three-bedroom apartments of 80 to 120 sqm. The residential units are complemented by a cinema room, a dinner room for parties and celebrations, a guest apartment, a gym with a sauna and a relaxation area, and retail space at the ground floor. The Helix Tower includes 138 units, plus amenities.
Norra Tornen is a contemporary architectural work and a unique apartment building, divided into two buildings, Helix and Innovationen
At a height of 125 meters, and 110 meters, respectively, the two towers are the highest residential buildings in Stockholm’s city center. Located in Hagastaden, a new district in the north of Stockholm developed around the Karolisnka Institute (which awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine), they stand as a gate to the city. However, the manipulation of the initial building envelopes radically transforms their initial implied architecture of monumentality. It gives way to an articulation of domesticity. A once formalist structure comes to house apartments that are surprisingly informal…one could even say humanist.
Concrete at Norra Tornen comes in the form of prefabricated panels – a construction technique that allows work on the building site to continue even below the five-degree Celsius limit which prohibits in situ concrete pouring. Prefabrication also significantly reduced construction costs. This way a design with a wall-to-floor ratio close to 1 – most developers would be discouraged by a 0.5 ratio – was suddenly not an unthinkable proposition. The investment could be channeled in creating apartments with unique layouts, multiple orientations and extra square meters of windows – a precious asset in a country with scarce daylight for half of the year. In a city center with a housing stock largely built before the Second World War, Norra Tornen introduces a new way of living which brings together density with the possibility to enjoy outdoor space (Stockholm ranks fourth among the cities with the highest air quality in the European Union).
