The winner of Mies van der Rohe Prize in 2009, the Norwegian Snøhetta team, has imagined the volumetric shape of the Oslo Opera House as a manmade geography that can be both climbed or used as representative public space.
In 2000, the Norwegian architects from Snøhetta, already famous for their project of the Alexandria Library, won the international competition for the Oslo Opera House.
The organizers wished to build a major cultural and urban landmark able to trigger the urban renewal of an industrial zone and also promote the image of the capital as a cultural city through significant architecture. Obviously, they wanted a manifesto, a monumental building, and the Snøhetta architects came up with an architectural design whose focal point was a wrapping urban space. There is a ramp surrounding the building, a ascending route leading the visitor to the surveying-like-terrace roof offering excellent views of the fiord. The architects’ statement was to make an accessible building from each and every point of view; in fact, they sought to provide accessibility based on monumentality. The major criticism at that time went against the articulated ramp: many thought that an uncovered urban space and such a slope could not possibly work in Scandinavia due to its climate. However, after two years from its opening, the public space wrapping the building became the city’s major attraction, and in May 28, 2009 was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Prize. The jury highlighted the wrapping ramp as “the most representative element” of the whole compound.
How to make room
For hundreds of years, Bjørvika has been Oslo’s commodity harbor. The urban landscape is defined by containers, cranes, and piers, being split from the city by a highway. From the sea, from the fiord, it seems like a self-contained place with no connection to the older city, because the hill on which the Akershus fortress stands visually divides the historic center from the industrial zone.
A Master Plan started in 2000 meant to regenerate the Bjørvika area through a significant landmark, a catalyst of further urban transformations and the new center of the city. Thus, it was vital that the site of the future Opera should be visible from the fiord so that the new junction could be seen in the waterfront. Thus, it was essential to pick a location beyond the shore so as the city would seem to spread to the water, the fiord, as a powerful statement meant to prove the regeneration intention. Consequently, a new center is generated in the city which thus is reinvented as a peninsula sitting on several piers.
In 2010, the work on the tunnel to replace the current highway will start. The Opera House, a real tourist landmark, will be connected to the historic center along with the whole Bjørvika zone. Now, the city is still growing to the fiord and gradually takes another harbor area, Tjuvholmen. Such interventions belong in a global strategy of urban development, the so-called “Fjordcity” program. That aims at converting all the industrial and harbor areas into neighborhoods with office buildings and commercial spaces.
Public space on ice bank
The Oslo Opera House with its narrative architecture falls into that category of monuments to which the visitor is taken along a clearly defined route containing key markers, eventful passages and many twists and turns. The inbuilt tension of the narrative is not based on color contrasts or odd mixtures of materials but on the emergence of forms from the landscape.
Inside, wood, a warm material prevails – it is oak of natural tints. The spiral coiling around the central area reminds the viewer of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. However, Frank Lloyd Wright made it white; here it is livelier, with an intended organic texture. The architects call the volume the “wave wall”. Protected by a 15 m glazed box, it can be seen from the outside as the core of the ensemble.
The exterior is characterized by cold materials (marble, aluminum, transparent glass) and a single color – polar white. Seen from afar in summer, the building looks like an ice bank from which several floating ices are drifting in the fiord. In winter, when the bay is covered in snow, the outside ramps and the tilted platform merge into the blurring landscape.
It is on that platform that the passer-by stops to contemplate the place where the fiord water splashes the cold marble beach, the distant landscape on the fiord shores and the main façade of the building. “The square” in front of the monument allows one to contemplate the whole, thus inviting one to pass on to the foyer and walk around the building, and them climb up the articulated ramp. The final point of this ascending route is the terrace – the other ice bank dominated by the volume where the stage is set like some icy monolith; the latter is plated in aluminum with Braille-like texture. From the top, the city seems to vanish somewhere at the back. The variations of both the slope and stone texture (resulting from the architects’ collaboration with some fine artists), make the visitor feel like walking on floating ice. From above the foyer, the visitor stops just to look at the tourists lying on the platform-beach or take some photos of the fiord, with or without people that he/she knows.
The absence of vegetation (except one garden in an area where people cannot have access), the cafes arranged only in the foyer, the whole signalectics and discreet urban furniture (of minimal expression) along with the lack of protection of visitors against elements (by pergolas, for instance) does not stop people to visit it. So far some 250,000 people have seen the place.
Epilog
The project has generated a place in the city and thus triggered a national trend in the profession: the Norwegians have taken to a unemotional aesthetics based on light, transparency, purity of colors and materials. In 2009, another competition proposing the conversion of a neighboring depot zone into an ensemble of high rise buildings was won by Kristin Jarmund Architects in collaboration with C. F. Møller Architects with a proposal surprisingly named Crystal Clear.
Photo: Carmen Popescu, Gerald Zugman
Translation: Magda Teodorescu
