Porsgrunn used to be one of the main industry towns in Norway. Today, in the era of the post social-democracy fueled by the North sea oil, the town of 35000 inhabitants tries to redefine itself - it wants to be proud of its industrial past, but also wants to acknowledge its keeping up with the current "urban trends", usually by using models of urban development seen everywhere in Norway, so called the third iterations of London´s Docklands (the second iteration is Aker Brygge in Oslo, from the second half of the 1980s).

The site is on the west bank of Skien River, in between two main bridges.
It consists of an average shopping mall and a run-down folk history museum. In contexts like this, a site in a proximity to the historical center, which is suffocated due to the lack of the collective inventiveness and inefficiency of the small scale shopping, the transformation processes are mostly triggered by the private initiative
(while the public/municipal is reduced to the facilitator).

In Porsgrunn, the promoter is a shopping mall developer, one of the most important ones in Norway.
The project starts with a contradiction: the developer wants an introvert controlled box; the city wants a maximized public field.
The proposal tries to redefine the idea of the mall in relation to the private/public sphere while maintaining the absoluteness of the shopping matrix.