LOCATION: Oslo, Norway

PROGRAM: Museum

STATUS: Proposed 2009

Our competition entry for a new National Museum in Oslo, Norway was a formal response to both site and program. The complexities of the site required us to set it in from the street, forming an interior courtyard with the historic buildings around it. An entry volume reached out to create frontage on the waterfront. Each of the four ‘collections,’ Older Art, Contemporary Art, Craft & Design, and Temporary exhibitions are contained within four distinct cubes. From the second floor, visitors can enter each of the buildings within a building, which open to each other on each subsequent level. The point is to allow the collections and the visitors’ understanding of them to remain distinct while allowing for communication and juxtaposition between them.