58 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM Knarvik Church, by Reiulf Ramstad Architects
Norwegian Wood For Norway’s most cutting-edge architects, every structure – from a cliffside shelter to an urban landmark – is a chance to pay homage to the country’s natural splendour. By Justin Davidson PHOTO COURTESY REIULF RAMSTAD ARCHITECTS Snøhetta is a brooding, four-peaked mountain that looms over the rock fields of central Norway, where musk ox and reindeer graze. Snøhetta is also the name of the Norwegian architecture firm that designed Oslo’s opera house, a sloped ice shelf of a building that appears to be either rearing from the fjord or melting back into it. Ever since it opened in 2008, I have been captivated by the way this most urbane of buildings, built on an abandoned industrial site in the middle of a major city, can merge so seamlessly with the landscape. I have the sense that Norway cultivates a unique architectural sensibility, merging design with ubiquitous wilderness. If architects learn as much from forests and fjords as they do from studying Le Corbusier, then perhaps those lessons leach into their urban structures too. “There’s a side to Norwegians that’s oblivious to nature – they’ll stick an ugly parking lot in the middle of some amazing landscape,” says Craig Dykers, one of the architect-founders of Snøhetta. “But you also find some really interesting works where it’s difficult to tell what’s a building and what’s landscape. The crossover is remarkable.” It’s clear that to understand where the opera house’s fusion of artifice and nature came from, I’d have to head into untamed country. My journey begins in the landlocked Dovrefjell-Sunndalsfjella National Park, at the spot where one Snøhetta peak faces the other. I drive past a lonely former military base and hike a mile to a treeless plateau opposite the mythic mountain. There, the architects have placed a simple but exquisite one-room shelter with weathering steel sides and a glass wall for viewing stone, snow, brush and, if you’re lucky, reindeer. The Norwegian Wild Reindeer Pavilion, as it’s officially called, is a tough structure in a hard place, but its spirit is romantic, thanks to a rippled wall of rough-cut pine that flows into benches both inside and out. The woodwork evokes both Norway’s shipbuilding history and its elaborate medieval › CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 59
