The Norwegian National Ballet and Opera, designed by Snøhetta, opened in Oslo in 2008 Gallery, captured these simple wooden structures huddling beneath cliffs and peaks, perpetually on the verge of obliteration. He could return today and paint almost exactly the same scenes. In the mid-1990s, Norway’s architectural talents acquired global resonance: Fehn won the international Pritzker Prize in 1997, and work began in 1995 on the new design by Snøhetta, then a collection of young upstarts, for a building to replace the lost Library of Alexandria, in Egypt, for which they won a competition in 1988. Those two jolts of prestige prompted the government to start treating architecture as a national resource. Norway’s roadways authority launched the Norwegian Scenic Routes programme with nearly 0 million to spend over 35 years. The idea was to turn the nation’s most extreme places into navigable attractions, boosting tourism, urging Norwegians to see their own country, and using design to give travellers access to the wilderness all around. Open competitions encouraged young architects to get involved; winning a project could establish a career, since it demonstrated an ability to reconcile mood with prosaic function, durability with spectacle. From a pilot project in the mid-1990s, the programme has grown to 18 routes, with dozens of built projects linked by roads so exquisitely engineered and maintained that they practically become poetry. “There’s so much natural beauty that you don’t always pay attention to it,” says Dykers. “A landscape can be difficult to see. Place an object in that landscape and now you see it in a different, more focused way.” A short, wet drive takes me back to Lofoten’s main highway, the E10, and I pull into the Torvdalshalsen parking lot just as the rain abates, allowing me to imagine (though not actually want) an outdoor lunch. Here, 70°N Arkitektur, a small firm based in the Arctic city of Tromsø, has installed a catwalk of weathered slats that shoots straight out toward a grey-green vista of water, cloud, peak and moor. A partition wall divides the tables from the parking lot, so that picnickers can stay focused on nature while they snack. Even empty, there’s a syncopated dance in the play of decks and ramps, tables and banquettes, and the whole arrangement steps down so that nobody can block anyone else’s view. The drivers, RV roamers and tour bus passengers who pass this way hardly register this place as architecture at all. But because a team of designers has fussed over the pathway from parking spot to overlook, and considered how the sun sets and shadows fall – because someone has cared for every detail – travellers feel a sense of harmoniousness and drama that they cannot necessarily pinpoint. The road meanders southwest, and brings me to another rest stop at Akkarvikodden, a winning collaboration between two Oslo-based firms, Manthey Kula and Landskapsfabrikken AS. The terrace is exquisitely minimalist: a smooth platform with grey concrete tables and black granite benches arranged at various angles so that you can select your view from different proportions of boulder and wave. The bathrooms are housed in his-and-hers mini-mountains made of weathering steel, with angled glass roofs that negotiate the perfect compromise between daylight and privacy. It’s 10pm and the sky’s still bright when I reach Nusfjord, a fishing village so perfectly picturesque in its isolation that it has been turned into a living museum and down-home resort. Exploring the quiet town, I come across a set of astonishing wooden dunes inserted into the rock behind the hotel. This, it turns out, is an outdoor spa, an undulating latticework that enfolds a hot tub and a sauna and invites guests to lie out in the northern sun. The lightweight but sturdy structure, capable of absorbing a storm’s body blow, resembles solidified spume and softened rock at the same time. Later, I find an online time-lapse › 62 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
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