Starry night. Munch Stenersen Museum in Oslo
Our objective is to propose a very emblematic project, which can be powerful enough to project the town of Oslo into the unique Edvard Munch’s city, and which can be generous with all the inhabitants and the public.
The shape of the project takes its roots in curves, like Edvard Munch paintings. But also like the Norway Mountains, and like the fjords. There is a triangular grid, on which emerge curves designing all the peaks of the projects, with a progression in the direction of the sea: More the project goes south to the sea, more the peaks are decreasing, becoming slopes and conches for all the outdoor spaces, where you can be protected from the winds and directly in the orientation of the sun.
The curves are also always created to emphasize the program: To create wonderful ceilings to the Munch collections, to give a lot of sloping facade searching the sun and the maximum of light for the housings and the other programs, to welcome in a generous way the arrival of the cable car line, to protect from the winds a lot of terraces and open spaces, …Each curve is a story dedicated to a specific goal of each program.
The Opera House and our project have some common objectives: We have tried to reinterpret some very successful objectives that are in the Opera: the generosity of the outdoor spaces, the way that the users can appropriate themselves parts of the building in walking on it. But in some other objectives, the goal was a complementary one: Connected to the colours, our project is as dark as the Opera is white. I was deeply impressed by the Munch Paintings, and by the strong colours that he used: colours that are rare and deep, that are mixed in a very fluid way, sensitive shadows…The result is a shape full of dense and different types of blues …One of the inspirations was the “starry night” painting.
And as the deep painting is spangled with stars, the shape is also spangled with openings, windows, terraces, belvederes, which are emerging everywhere to get the views in a lot of marvellous belvederes, or to be connected with the outdoor spaces.
The location of Munch Museum itself is quite in the middle of the project, really irradiating and enchanting the whole site, like a heart. The interior spaces are sometimes sculpted by the shape of the curved roof, for example in the exhibition places, to give smooth impresses, like if the interiors were draped with white and partly translucent ceilings. The goal is to exhibit the Munch Paintings in a calm atmosphere, with appeasement and calmness.
