The Munch Museum in Oslo, by Estudio Herreros, selected as a finalist for the Mies Van der Rohe Award 2024.
The 40 shortlisted works for the Mies Van der Rohe Award 2024, the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, have been published. Among the finalists is the Munch Museum by Estudio Herreros. The Spanish studio won the international competition to design the museum in 2009. The museum, which opens on 22 October 2021, with an exhibition of 26,700 works by Munch, is the largest museum in the world dedicated to a single artist. Among them is the famous work “The Scream”, which was stolen in 2004, only to be recovered in 2006.
The building, built over the waters of the fjord and supported by 40-metre-deep piles, is a 13-storey tower that combines exhibition spaces with other types of spaces conceived as civic meeting places. In this sense, the foyer that acts as a large covered plaza stands out, as well as the large viewing platform open to the public on the top floor, which allows visitors to enjoy the views of the city.
The museum is part of the urban redevelopment project of Oslo’s waterfront called Fjorbyen, within which the new Bjørvika district is being developed. It is in this waterfront neighbourhood that the Opera House and the Baltic Opera House are being built on the waterfront. In addition to the Munch Museum, the Oslo National Opera and Ballet (Snøhetta, 2008) and the new Deichman Library (Atelier Oslo + Lund Hagem, 2020), which received the Public Library of the Year award in 2021, are being built in this waterfront district.
Apart from these three milestones of recent Norwegian architecture, Oslo has seen a proliferation of avant-garde buildings by both local architects and international talents. To discover the best of contemporary Norwegian architecture, Artchitectours is organising a 6-day Trip to Oslo and several surrounding towns, such as Jevnaker, Fornebu and Magnor, between 23 and 28 July 2024.
