National Museum Oslo
Oslo. Norway
Gross floor area: 50.000 sqm
The whole area is a collage of different building forms. It becomes a small city for itself. The main museum corpus is a arrangement of blocks, forming a fjord. These corpuses are sketching the outline of a valley. In the middle of the valley rises the main staircase with the public lifts. This is the center of the valley, a tower of strength, solid as a rock in the surf. The tower fulfills different needs. It is a point of orientation as well as it provides the main vertical infrastructure and supports the horizontal connections between the different parts of the museum. The whole man-made valley evokes an overwhelming larger-than-life-scenery and gives every visitor the feeling of being a guest in outstanding place, quite like the artificial Norwegian land- and fjord- scape with its breathtaking coastline.
The valley becomes the main road to Norwegian culture as well as it is a unique place for every kind of meetings, events and even simple gathering for the people. A large plaza is the heart of every key civic institution. But it’s more than a plaza while it is sheltered with a light and transparent superstructure.