Pressing ahead - design of a newspaper office building in Oslo, Norway

Architectural Review, The, June, 1995 by Peter Davey

On a key site in central Oslo, the architects had to create a commercial building that would both add to the dignity and precious gem-like quality of the city without wanting to speak too loudly and threaten existing monuments.

The centre of Oslo is a delightful and precise expression of urban and political propriety. At the west end of the gardens of Karl Johans gate - the main avenue is the royal palace, and at the other end is the parliament building; to the south is the town hall looking over the harbour at the head of the fjord; to the north of the street is the great court of the oldest university buildings (designed by Schinkel, it is said). The major institutions of national and civic life are appropriately and monumentally celebrated, and they are connected by a varied and decent matrix. The whole length of the thoroughfare is lined with grand hotels and fine shops (or it was until the apparently unstoppable advance of multi-national mediocrity and tat).

Akersgaten runs up from the sea at right angles to this main axis and becomes one of the most important cross streets. Traditionally, it has combined the roles of Fleet Street and Whitehall, with offices for some of the major newspapers and government ministries set in close proximity to each other and to the main Oslo law courts. The street terminates to the north in the spiky red brick and green copper of Trefoldighetskirken, a strange amalgam of Neo-Gothic and Baroque built in 1858 by Alexis de Chateauneuf, and originally intended to be a kind of Protestant mini-St Peter's dominating the northern part of the inner city. The intended effect is now difficult to appreciate for the Government Quarter, the upper east side of the street, was redeveloped as a series of object buildings set in open space between the late '50s and early '70s by Eding Viksjo, who had won the competition for the redevelopment of the ministerial area as early as 1939, Viksjo's tall slab and lower Y-shaped building are now dreadfully out of fashion, but they had both dignity and daring in their time and one day, they and their naturbetong (fine patterned sandblasted in-situ concrete) construction may be valued again. But thank goodness the experiment was not allowed to extend beyond the perimeter of one city block.

A much more urban governmental response to the city is to be found in Henrik Bull's Finance Ministry immediately to the south of Viksjo's quarter. Finished in rough grey granite ashlar in 1904, the building is a kind of stern Jugendstil statement of Norwegian nationality made a year before the country finally managed to win freedom from Sweden.

Opposite is the new building for the Verdens Gang newspaper, in its way every bit as rigorous and tough as Bull's. Since the late 1960s Lund & Slaatto have pursued a fascination with rigorous investigation of structure and construction that perhaps derives from Mies. But over the years, Kjell Lund and his colleagues have developed methods of retaining rigour while being much more site and purpose specific than Mies ever wanted to be. And in some of the work, particularly St Hallvard's, Oslo (An June 1990) they have added a level of magic and richness to which the Master never aspired - the church is one of the most numinous buildings of the twentieth century.

Nothing could be less spiritual than Verdens Gang (the Way of the World), a racy full colour tabloid (which curiously has a few intelligent features embedded in the scandal and silliness). But its new house has a great deal of dignity and is a distinguished addition to both street and city. Its open, rational glass facade reflects the closed austerity of the Finance Ministry across the street - perhaps an apt metaphor for the relationship of press and government. Behind the glass is a 10-storey high glazed arcade that runs west from Akersgaten to the Munchs gate at the other side of the plot. The arcade acts as the entrance hall for; the offices on the upper floors, but it is open to everyone as a covered city path; it has specialist shops and a bar on the Akersgate level and, when it descends by escalator to the Munchs gate level, a large supermarket.

The arcade is flanked on each side by offices. The 40 m by 80 m site has been divided into four strips running east-west on a 9.6 m module. Two strips of offices lie to the south of the arcade and there is one to the north. The module in the other direction is 4.8 m and there is a planning grid of 2.4 m which allows the offices to be made into either individual cells, open plan spaces or combi-offices, the Scandinavian form of layout where individual offices surround group spaces that themselves open into larger communal areas. With the standard 3.4 m floor to floor heights, the plan grids form a three-dimensional lattice from which the architects have carved the form and spaces of the building with great imagination and strict precision.

The outer walls are almost flush and, except in the glass wall that fronts the internal arcade where steel is used, they consist of a grid of precast concrete strips that follow the lines of the beams and columns inside; the concrete is acid washed to reveal the reddish aggregate. What you see is not loadbearing but represents the structure in much the way that the externally expressed steel in a Mies building is a metaphor of the real concrete jacketed staunchions inside. The openings between the precast members are filled with a variety of materials: various forms of glass, pressed aluminium panels and panels of flame-treated red granite. The latter have caused Christian Norberg-Schulz to explode that when you look at the rough granite of Bull's building one then understands that panels do not do honour to this material (Byggekunst 6, 1994, p383). But surely an office and shopping building is not, at least in conventional terms, as worthy of honour as a major ministry. Lund is trying to create a hierarchy of expression which honours the major buildings without being demeaning to the less important ones like the VG corner.