If, in 1978, a Corbusian villa had migrated to Norway, fully embraced Brutalism, and tried to fit in as an office building, it might have turned out something like Sverdrupsgate 27, the headquarters for the then newly established Norwegian Petroleum Directorate in Stavanger. Starting with a two-story horizontal concrete block, complete with ribbon windows, ground-floor cut-aways, and even a ship’s-funnel-shaped stair tower, Sverdrupsgate 27 then took a note from its snow-savvy vernacular neighbors and adopted a pair of steeply pitched, height-doubling shed roofs. Volumetric, dynamically asymmetrical, and rational in plan, the building achieved a locally adapted, classically inspired iteration of late modernism that somehow managed to imply the not-yet-bitter promise of the petroleum age.

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