Lead. A 22-story, 25,000 m² corporate office tower for Visma — one of Norway's largest software companies — completed in 2011 as part of the build-out of an emerging Oslo commercial district. The architectural challenge was to give a single-tenant office tower a public identity beyond a glass box, by treating the structural and service systems normally hidden behind the facade as the building's primary architectural argument.

Site & brief. The site sits in one of Oslo's growing commercial districts, where new office towers were beginning to define a new corporate skyline through the late 2000s. The brief asked for a 25,000 m² office tower as a Visma headquarters address — workforce, executive, and meeting programmes stacked across 22 floors — and a clear external identity in a market where most office towers read interchangeably.

Idea. Put the structure on the outside. The required steel cross-bracing — usually buried inside core walls or wrapped in cladding — is pulled to the perimeter and left exposed behind a uniform glazed facade, sitting in the same plane as the stairs, elevators, and service stacks. From outside the tower reads as horizontal layered stripes punctuated by visible X's of structural bracing and vertical slits where the services rise. The building's identity is built from the things most office towers spend money to hide.

Resolution. The tower's profile shifts in plan with a soft S — the volume jogs across the section so no two facades read identically and the surrounding skyline gets foreground and depth. The horizontal layered facade alternates glazed bands with solid bands in a varying rhythm calibrated to the floor plate; the cross-bracing concentrates at the corners and along the service spine where stairs and elevators rise. Inside, those same stripes filter daylight deep into the workplace floor plates, and the stair atria — set inside the cross-braced wall — let people see and be seen by the city as they move between floors.