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'The Soul of Norway': Oslo's Gardermoen Airport
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19055 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 2000 |
2,290 Words |
| Author
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Stephen Henkin
Stephen Henkin is an arts editor for The World & I. |
Until recently, flying into Oslo meant landing at Fornebu, an airport located next door to the Norwegian capital. Although Fornebu was convenient to city center, the suburbs were encroaching on its landing strips, expansion of the facility was sorely limited, and hungry developers were eyeing the airport's mostly empty expanse, located temptingly close to the sea. In the early 1990s, the Norwegian government had similar thoughts and decided to build a new airport to the north of Oslo, at Gardermoen, in the gently rolling, forested hills of Akershus County.
The design of Oslo International Airport at Gardermoen, which became Norway's largest land-based project ever, was assigned to Aviaplan Architects, a consortium of four firms--three in Oslo and one in Copenhagen. Aviaplan's mandate was to create a state-of-the-art facility as well as one that was representative of byggeskikk, which has been translated as "Norwegian vernacular" by some and "Norwegian practice, or custom" by others. Regardless of definition, a public opinion poll was taken about what Norwegian-style means today: "Prudence, closeness to nature, an open and egalitarian society, and good usage of local resources" were found to be qualities seemingly as relevant to contemporary as traditional Norwegian architecture.
Perhaps Norwegian architectural writer Christian Norberg-Schulz, in a recent issue of Byggekunst ("Storromets Arkitektur," January 1999), puts the attempt to define "Norwegian-ness" into a more proper framework: "There is no aim [in the airport's design] to invoke a nationalistic adaptation of a cozy tradition, but ... to show that we have [architecturally] arrived at this place, a truthful expression of
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