Oslo: The Latest Architecture and News

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White Arkitekter has proposed a timber-framed "lantern" design for in a new addition to the local art center in Akershus, Norway as part of a limited architecture competition. The design by White Arkitekter was selected as a runner-up, with Haugen/Zohar Arkitekter named the winner. White’s design aims to connect the art facilities to adjacent historical institutions and create additional public space.

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Videos

The Eero Saarinen-designed US Embassy in Oslo is set to be placed under historic preservation orders following the building’s sale by the US government.

The US embassy to Norway since 1959, the building will change hands once staff are moved into the new US embassy building at Huseby, which is expected to complete in early 2017.

In 2014, Snøhetta was announced as one of two winners in a competition to design new banknotes for the Norwegian Bank. Now, after 2 years of development, the first bills have been produced and are nearly ready to begin full circulation.

To coincide with the occasion, Norges Bank has released a series of videos explaining the design and production process. Check them out below.

In collaboration with Kistefos Museum, photographer Frédéric Boudin has captured Jeppe Hein's installation "Path of Silence," now permanently located in Jevnaker near Oslo. The sculpture is inspired by the topography of the Kistefos Sculpture Park, creating a conversation between the installation and its site by adapting the park's stepped slope and terraces to a freeform profile.

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As the second chapter in his series, Iconic Norway, Alejandro Villanueva has released a time-lapse of the Trollstigen Visitor Center, a project by Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekters for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration in Oslo, Norway.

In this film, presented in collaboration with +KOTE, the After Belonging Agency—Carlos Minguez Carrasco, Ignacio Galán, Alejandra Navarrese Llopis, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, and Marina Otero Verzier—narrate a walkthrough of In Residence, one of the two core exhibitions at this year's Oslo Architecture Triennale: After Belonging – A Triennale In Residence, On Residence, and the Ways We Stay in Transit.

In the latest edition of Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, Henry Rees-Sheridan visits Oslo to speak to Hanna Dencik Petersson, Director of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, and Alejandra Navarrete Llopis and Ignacio González Galán – two members of its curatorial team, the After Belonging Agency. The show explores the concept behind the exhibitions of the Triennale, what it means to be located in Norway's capital, and how the event's trajectory is both a symptom and cause of Oslo’s development as a design city. ArchDaily's James Taylor-Foster weighs in on After Belonging's significance.

SPOL Architects’ First Hotel OSL, a hotel near the newly extended Oslo Airport, has received planning approval after a unanimous vote in the Jessheim City Council. Designed to be a destination in itself, the hotel will be an environmentally friendly oval shape, featuring 300 rooms and a large atrium for sports activities.

Acting as a “meeting place for globe trotters,” the hotel aims to become a shared space for shared experiences for travelers.

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“Belonging,” the curatorial quintet of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, After Belonging, argue, “is no longer something bound to one’s own space of residence, or to the territory of a nation.” For this group of Spanish-born architects, academics and theorists—Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio Galán, Carlos Minguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrese Llopis and Marina Otero Verzier—the very notion of our belongings and what it means to belong is becoming increasingly unstable.

After Belonging is the sixth incarnation of the Triennale and the first one in which a single curatorial thread has woven all of the festival’s activities together, including the international conference. The goal of the two primary exhibitions—On Residence and In Residence, including a series of Intervention Strategies—is to develop platforms with the aim of “rehearsing research strategies,” providing new ways for architects to engage with “contemporary changing realities."

Metropolis Magazine has released their 2016 rankings of the world's most "livable" cities. Acknowledging that what makes a city "livable" can often be subjective, the team at Metropolis emphasizes that in creating the list they "focused on the concerns at Metropolis’ core—housing, transportation, sustainability, and culture." The result of this research was last year's top prize-winner Toronto dropping to the number 9 spot and Copenhagen, which last year took the number 4 spot, jumping to the top. Rounding out the top three are Berlin and Helsinki.

PANDA, an exhibition by OMA & Bengler, opens today at the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale – After Belonging.

From the architect. PANDA investigates the accelerating influence of digital sharing platforms, their social and political implications, and pervasive impact on the built environment. In the early 2000s, the democratic spaces of the web were greeted as an alternative to centralized commercial and social structure; in 2007, after the financial landslide, the sharing gospel gave hope to those struggling to make a living.

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Oslo-based Transborder Studio have won a competition for the development of new “Agricultural District” surrounding a former dairy factory in East Oslo. Selected from 5 proposals from invited architect teams, the winning design, entitled “Follow the Milk,” strives to develop the district into a place where “ agriculture has a new relevance related to urban food culture, bioproducts and the agricultural sector’s role in a sustainable future.”