Outrage - the central business district in Oslo, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Peter Davey

The modern central business district of Oslo is a mess, and a disgrace to a city centre which is otherwise of great quality and subtle, generous human scale.

Although the centre of Oslo is in many ways a model of what a small city should be like (p4), it falls apart to the north of the main station. Here in the early 1980s was a major opportunity: a run-down area of the city which could be improved and made to connect with the older parts of the centre. There was the wealth from North Sea oil. And there were precedents: a little to the west is the Storgata area, which was partly redeveloped in the 1930s, when architects like Erich Mendelsohn and Ole Sverre evolved Modern Movement buildings that made real contributions to a civilised urban fabric of streets and open spaces.

Instead, the area next to the station has become a menagerie for object buildings, each trying to outdo its neighbours in the vulgarity of its gestures. Perhaps every European city does, like Paris, need a La Defense, an area in which gross and otherwise intrusive buildings can be corralled so that they do not run amok over everyone else. But, at least at La Defense the central space has gradually become almost genial with events and greenery breaking up its huge scale: clumsy it may be, but it is an attempt at urban place.

No such subleties seem to have afflicted the planners of Oslo's would-be central business district. Apart from the nineteenth-century Jernbanetorg, which lies in front of the old station and its neighbouring successor, there is no attempt to generate public open space. Pedestrians are exposed on windy bridges over heavily trafficked roads. The very shapes of the buildings seem to add to the blustery and polluted atmosphere.

Doubtless a bus station was needed near the railway one, but did it have to be quite so grim and exhausting to use? A city like Oslo needs a covered amphitheatre, but was it essential to make it here? (For all the ingenious treatment of its external walls, it is about as responsive to the rest of the city as a rock dropped from the moon.) In the northern climate, enclosed shopping centres are plainly vital, but do they have to be quite so ungenerous to the public realm?

Perhaps the real trouble with the whole area is lack of generosity. Proper urban textures offer citizens choice and variety. In this part of Oslo, where the public realm has either been privatised or completely ignored, you are reduced to having to choose between being a worker or a consumer, a spectator or a passenger. The area is not only hideous, it is demeaning to the spirit.

The country remains prosperous: perhaps now that the human problems of this built cacophony of '80s values can be seen, its worst aspects can be ameliorated. This will need imagination, but Norway has plenty of that.