NowOslo

Architecture

Architecture in Oslo

Oslo has moved its cultural buildings onto the waterfront the port left behind, one at a time since 2008. The results are large public objects in a city that had not previously built any.

• National Museum

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  Completed 2022

  Kleihues + Schuwerk

  The merged national collections of art, architecture and design in one building behind the city hall. Kleihues and Schuwerk clad a heavy base in hand-cut Oppdal slate and set a single hall on top, walled in thin-sliced marble laminated between glass so the room is lit through the stone itself. The eighty-six collection rooms below are quiet by comparison. Built to last rather than to be photographed, it reads as a base with one lantern on it.

• Munch Museum

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  Completed 2021

  Estudio Herreros

  A vertical museum for the collection Edvard Munch left the city, next to the opera house. Estudio Herreros stacked thirteen storeys and bent the top toward the old centre, then clad the tower in recycled perforated aluminium of varying translucency, so the surface changes with the weather and glows from within at night. Visitors move up rather than along, which is unusual for a museum of one artist. The lean is a gesture rather than a necessity, and has been argued about for it.

• Astrup Fearnley Museum

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  Completed 2012

  Renzo Piano

  A private museum of contemporary art on the Tjuvholmen spit, at the end of the harbour promenade. Piano split the programme into three timber-clad volumes and pulled one curved glass roof over all of them, on slender steel columns and ceramic-fritted where the galleries need the light cut. A canal runs between the buildings, crossed by small bridges. The roof is the whole gesture, and it keeps northern light usable inside.

• Oslo Opera House

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  Completed 2008

  Snøhetta

  The national opera and ballet house, and the first building of the Bjørvika redevelopment. Snøhetta laid a plane of white Carrara marble from the water's edge up over the roof, so the public can walk to the top without entering, and set the oak-clad auditorium behind glass as a warm object inside a cold one. The marble is cut with a pattern that stays grippable when wet. The roof is used more than the auditorium, which the design allows for.

• Oslo City Hall

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  Completed 1950

  Arnstein Arneberg · Magnus Poulsson

  The city hall on the harbour, begun in 1931, halted by the occupation and finished in 1950. Arneberg and Poulsson built it in dark red brick of a medieval size, as two towers over a low block, plain outside and covered inside with murals painted through the same two decades. It took so long that the art in it records a change of national circumstance. The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in the main hall, which is why most people see the interior.