In the North of Norway we have a lot of mountains and fjords, and having grown up among them I feel kind of lost down south (east) where they call hills mountains and puddles lakes. It’s as if my natural points of reference are gone, replaced by the Radisson SAS hotel, the tallest building in Norway. But no more! The same guys who did our horrid open offices won the architectural competition and got to design the new Opera House in Oslo. It has already won several prizes and has been compared to the equivalent in Sydney. Personally I really like it. It has lots of nice geometrical lines and it does resemble a mountain or an ice berg. Let’s just hope the re-building of the nearby area when the highway’s put underground doesn’t prove to be a Titanic. Last week Lady C hauled me out of the office and into the sunlight, to marvel at this great slab of Italian marble. It was nice.
You still have to cross the motorway to get to the Opera House
Gotta love how they managed to do this without implicit reference to Appleware
"The roof has many steps and may be slippery. Bicycles or skateboards not allowed. Use of the area is at your own risk."
It was really slippery. Glad I’m not a wheelchair user here. Of course it’s not mandatory to run around on the roof, but you know you wanna!
The white marble and the snow reflected all the afternoon sunlight..
Ah, the cubes… It was probably designed in Google SketchUp!
The entrance. Nice to see that regular people use the place.
Just inside the building, looking up towards the roof. Looks like something from ALIENS.
On the top of the roof looking east. It was incredibly quiet.
It was a really nice walk on and around the building, although I almost got a headache from all the reflected sunlight. Some places it was slippery as fuck, and I watched several people just slide off into the ocean and drown..
Well, not really, but I imagined it vividly.
I must say I feel proud of this building. It’s as if I built it myself. And I did!
Or my tax payments did. If I get visitors from abroad I can easily take them here to enjoy the view and atmosphere. It felt like an island of silence just a few minutes walk from the central train station and in the middle of a busy harbor. Really weird. I only hope they allow for some park areas around it when they finally move the highway underground. Good job, Snøhetta! You did a better job than you did with our offices, which looks like they were drawn by a crazy drunk with cataracts. You need to smoke more of that shit.
If you want to see more of these pictures, or something completely different, I suggest you check out my flickr page. Peace out, biatches.