Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway

Munch Museum to join Opera House in Oslo's new cultural district
Spanish firm Herreros Arquitectos has won first prize in the invited international competition for a master plan of the Bjorvika neighborhood, Oslo, proposing the Munch Museum as the focus.

The future complex formed by the Munch Museum MM and the Stenersen Museum Collections is not only to safeguard and disseminate a basic heritage of the history and character of Norwegian culture. The complex is conceived as an institution which is open to the city and highly visible, that “which must be visited many times in a lifetime”, said the spokesperson for Herreros.

The project’s spaces include a Leisure Island; Beach Area; Museum Island; Munch Plaza; Library Plaza; Bispekaia Market Square and Housing Courtyards.

The Museum building is located at the end of the Pauselkia Peninsula, near the Oslo Opera House, avoiding the cones of perception and ensuring views over the fort from the surrounding mountains are kept. With this position Herreros aim to intensify the tension between the fjord and solid ground, and to avoid the arrogant gesture of placing it frontally.

The museum is built as a vertical concrete box of 16 m of free light hermetically sealed except when the program requires opening of spaces. It is built with four 40 cm thick screens which form a prism, the long sides of which require buttresses (60x30cm) every 6m which embrace lightly post-tensioned flagstones. The gap resulting from levelling up the buttresses in order to have exhibition rooms with continuous walls generates an installations chamber which is highly versatile and which runs along the building and ensures exhaustive control of the networks in each room.

The proposal as a whole is notably integrated with energy and environmental sensitivity issues. The mass use of water from the fjord as a temperature controlling element in the building is based on the elimination of air conditioning as far as possible, substituting it for an element which is easily treated, subject to work at low temperature and with a minimum waste of energy.

source: www.worldarchitecturenews.com
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