If you don’t have plans to visit Norway, you should make them as soon as possible. We are saying this because visitors to Norway can now enjoy their food while being surrounded by aquatic life thanks to the impressive restaurant, Under, by Snøhetta. Under has part of it sunk into the sea and encased using a concrete shell that has been designed for withstanding the harsh conditions that the seabed of Norway’s rugged southern coast has to offer.
Snøhetta likes Under to a sunken periscope. It is a 34 meters long restaurant that was constructed on top of a barge a short distance from where it is resting now. It is indeed an amazing feat of engineering. Quite wonderful!
Snøhetta said, ‘Under was built on a barge as a concrete tube shell 20 m [65 ft] from the site. The windows were installed prior to the submersion. During submersion, the structure floated on its own and was delicately moved to its final location by a separate crane and tugboats. Following the submersion, structural work was completed, and the building was bolted to a concrete slab anchored to the bedrock beneath the seabed. In order to ensure a proper connection to the bolts on the concrete slab, the construction team filled the structure with water to make it sink. After ensuring that all bolts were fully tightened, the water was drained away, allowing the interior work to begin.’
Under has an area of 600 square meters and features concrete walls that are one meter thick. These walls have been designed so that they can survive a ‘100-year wave’ without giving way. The visitors have to first of all enter into an oak-lined foyer before they can make their way down a staircase into the restaurant itself. The bar features a window that has been cut into the side of the wall and extends from above sea-level all the way down to the seabed.
Visitors enter into an oak-lined foyer before descending down a staircase into the restaurant proper. In the bar, a window is cut into the side of the wall vertically, extending from above sea level down to the seabed. The bottom of Under has a huge panoramic acrylic window that allows the diners to enjoy the ocean floor at a depth of 5 meters below the surface of the water.
Under is also meant for housing marine research. The basic idea is to employ the use of cameras and other instruments that have been installed on the façade to obtain data that can be then used for monitoring the population of marine life.