Of course they commissioned Iwan Baan. The Dutch architectural photographer is famous for staging the buildings he photographs with people. What was frowned upon in architectural photography for a long time, because nothing should distract from the sublime master design, was reversed by Baan: with him, dog owners walk through the picture when he shows opera houses, with him children are climbing around in the facade. He photographs buildings in such a way that they appear alive.
And that is exactly what the new National Museum in Oslo needs. Urgently. Because whoever stands in front of the meter-high wall clad in gray slate is likely to feel very small in front of the monumentality of the 54,600 square meter building. Baan went on a search until his camera found a group of young men on the steps of City Hall opposite, with skateboards, canned beers and boom boxes. With a distance of a few hundred meters, he shrank the new museum down to a human size.
In real life, however, the new National Museum in Oslo, planned by the German architect Klaus Schuwerk, whose consortium Kleihues + Schuwerk won an international competition in 2010, remains enormous. They are crazy squares that are stacked on top of each other in noble shades of gray. The impression is enhanced because the building hardly has any windows. If the edges of the facade weren’t so sharp, one could describe the whole thing as a rocky mountain looming in Oslo’s city bay across from Akershus Fortress and right next to the now dainty-looking cream-colored Nobel Peace Center in a former railway station building. And that’s a problem.
After all, shouldn’t a national museum be a place of identification? A place where pupils and kindergarten groups can get an idea of the past of their country, what culture and tradition? Where does a nation come from, what connects them and who does it want to be today? It’s not enough to empty a Norwegian quarry and think that all of this will happen automatically.
What matters is how the whole thing looks from the deck of a cruise ship
In Oslo, one has to wonder why such a forbidding museum has sprung up on one of the city’s most attractive lots. The building further down the bay could provide an answer. The new Munch Museum opened there last year. Even the otherwise uncompromising Norwegians wondered how one of the most emotional artists in art history could be stuck in such a cool, if not to say arbitrary, skyscraper. One argument for the tower was the building mass that could be accommodated in it. That wasn’t convincing.
The demand for space was also great for the National Museum. Three museums – the art collections of the National Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Applied Arts – have found a new home here. Around 6,500 works from the collection of art, design and architecture, which now totals 400,000 objects and covers a period from antiquity to the present day, are now on display in the impressive 86 rooms. “We can now tell the story more holistically,” says the museum’s project director Jon Geir Placht. Entire rooms are shown instead of just individual pieces of furniture, more cross-connections are drawn between the genres. The only question is whether it pays off and whether the quality of a museum really depends on its size. Will visitors stay longer if the museum is bigger? Or are you tired of looking at all the things that can still be visited? In any case, the museum is already working on a kind of expressway system that should bring visitors quickly to the highlights of the collection.
“We are putting ourselves on the map with the new museums,” says Jon Geir Placht. That was probably the main reason for these new museum buildings, not the increased need for space or the desire for modern functions. The National Museum, which costs a good 600 million euros, is advertised as the “largest museum in the north”, “bigger than international museums such as the Rijksmuseum and the Guggenheim Bilbao”. Oslo has been trying to develop into a tourist destination at breakneck speed for several years. Which is perhaps why the view of the new museums from the water, i.e. from the deck of a cruise ship, is more important than the view from the city dwellers themselves. Which is strongly reminiscent of similarly rich oil nations such as Norway: The United Arab Emirates and Qatar also have huge architectural dreams built in order to provide for when the sources of income from the earth dry up.
Don’t be put off, the museum has unique inner values
The two buildings that were also created as part of the new Fjord City show that Oslo actually has accessible architecture: the Deichman main library and the Oslo Opera. While the roof of the opera is an integral part of any stroll through the city, whether you are a local or a tourist, the Deichman library acts as a large living room for everyone. The buildings are open, transparent and accessible, and in a very short time they have become a place of identification for an entire urban community.
Sure, art museums today have to meet enormous requirements to ensure the protection of works of art, but that shouldn’t be the reason for walling them up. The exemplary renovated New National Gallery in Berlin, thanks to the latest technology, shows that masterpieces from the 20th century can also be exhibited in sunlight and when the door to the inner courtyard is regularly open.
The National Museum in Oslo is still worth a visit. The collection instantly makes you forget the façade. The royal collection of robes surprises with women’s robes that are as colorful as they are daring. Edvard Munch is shown in the company of his contemporaries, above all the painter Christian Krohg. Presenting the fascinating illustrations of Erik Werenskiold and Theodor Kittel, who 150 years ago illustrated the Norwegian folk tales collected and written down by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe. You see giants there, overgrown with fir trees up to the tip of their beards, and mysterious merpeople with glowing green eyes emerging from still lakes. Appropriately, the room with the fairy tale drawings has been designed for younger visitors, with pebble-shaped seat cushions, a tree that grows to the ceiling with peepholes in the trunk, and where the works hang at child height. But in all other rooms, too, an attempt is made to give children access to what they see in them.
Which brings you to the so-called light hall on the top floor, a room whose dimensions can hardly be grasped: 130 meters long, seven meters high, with a translucent marble-glass facade along its length. Where temporary exhibitions are to be held in the future, contemporary artists from Norway will present themselves at the opening. A large-format cat’s face can be seen there, a surrealistic bedtime scene with a deer, abstract landscapes and detailed images of nature, in short: it criss-crosses all styles, genres and quality levels. The motley is fun and hope. The facade is deceptive.