Harmonic scale - Edvard Grieg Museum in Troldhaugen, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Peter Davey

Edvard Grieg was, like artists such as Ibsen, Bjornson and Munch, one of the articulators of modern Norwegian sensibility; their work fuelled national consciousness and helped pave the way to the country's independence in 1905.

In a sense, he was one of the founding fathers of the country and Troldhaugen,(1) his home near Bergen, is a national monument receiving many visitors a year. The wooden villa that he had built(2) on a promontory overlooking lake Nordas(3) was in his time in the middle of wild countryside, and he composed in a little hut on the shore.

It became clear, however, that the sheer numbers of visitors was beginning to destroy the place. Summer concerts were so popular that the immemorial atmosphere could not be retained. So some years ago, a little concert hall was built in the valley next to the ridge on which Troldhaugen the composer's house sits: with its turf roofs and simple rough concrete walls Sverre Leid's Troldsalen is a model of modesty and deference to the villa without being derivative or fawning (AR October 1987, pp64-65).

In 1993 a competition was launched for a Grieg museum which would absorb some of the ever increasing pressure on Troldhaugen and allow it to be more clearly the composer's house and the landscape he knew. Clearly, Leid's strategy of tucking the new building into a valley could not work again, and the winning scheme by CUBUS has resulted in a much more overt building. But the site has been carefully chosen so that the new museum is largely hidden from the house by the ridge on the opposite side of the little valley in which Troldsalen lies.

The museum is on the edge of the high ground on the south-east side of the promontory, on the line where it starts to fall steeply towards the shore. So from entrance level, the building seems to be only one storey high, but there is another floor down the slope which is partly cut into the rock. Here, in-situ concrete makes a platform on which the light superstucture of the entrance floor rises. The strategy is like that adopted by Sverre Fehn at the Villa Busk (p40), but the tactics are very different. At Troldhaugen the two-storey side is largely clad in glass, offering what the architects call 'an open [interior] landscape over two levels bounded by the roof, the fixed service zones on the north side, the exhibition rooms to the east and the tree tops to the south towards the Nordas lake'.

This magnificent vista greets you as you are inflected towards it through the unassuming entrance at the higher level. The diagridded laminated timber roof hovers over the whole space, seemingly almost floating on the very slender tubular steel columns. Dark painted, these (with the glazing bars of the south wall)(4) form an abstraction of the trees in the surrounding woods: the interior landscape responding to the exterior one. The glass wall undulates organically, partly taking its line from the topography below. Next to the stairs, it suddenly cuts back to enclose a large vertical light chute, open at top and bottom. This allows the elements, the snow and the wind, to be drawn almost into the middle of the building; in summer, the chute acts as a thermal chimney counteracting the solar gain through the south-facing glass wall. (The gallery section is protected from insolation by a lightweight rendered block wall that hovers rather improbably, but elegantly over the thin steel columns of the lower floor.)

Across the south side of the chute flies a bridge which will connect to the neighbouring ridge (at the moment it only connects the foyer to the cafeteria). Below, it is echoed by another bridge (or rather long open gallery), which connects the building to a restored path leading to the composer's hut on the side of the lake. Looking back along the path, the museum rises clear from the forest, and suddenly its lightness and precise thin detailing remind, rather incongruously, of California in the late 1940s: another place where architecture was made from which to contemplate forest and sea.

But the Grieg museum is no pastiche of the past, 100 or even 50 years ago. It uses today's technology and spatial perceptions with great imagination to help us understand Grieg and his world. P. D.

1 The troll hill or how. The name is the traditional appellation of the site.

2 Grieg made sketches for the timber free-style Classical house himself and built it with help from his cousin, Schack Bull.

3 Which is connected to the sea by a narrow channel, so its water is both fresh and sea, and its ecology particularly rare and strange.

4 The budget (and construction time) were very tight. Standard glazing was used in the glass wall, though the spacing of the bars and their section vary according to wind loads and spans. The roof is finished in felt, which the architects hope will one day be replaced by zinc or copper.