Barely twenty years, eighteen to be very precise, separate these two series of images. The first hangs in a corridor that connects the great hall of the Oslo Opera House to its dance school. May 2004, “the new Opera”, as indicated above the photo, is still only a platform surrounded by port and industrial warehouses. Anyone wanting to approach the water would have to do it twice: a gigantic highway, punctuated by interchanges, borders the fjord at the bottom of which the Norwegian capital has developed. In a photo taken two years later, the building is taking shape, but still at the heart of a road junction.
The second series has been on display since mid-September two metro stations away, in the former Edvard Munch Museum, where The Scream, by the famous Norwegian painter, had been stolen. The architecture and urban planning triennial is holding its 8e edition, until October 30. On the walls of one of the rooms, a series of sixteen panels, texts and 3D projections show children with their feet in the water, landing net in hand, alongside adults who, when they are not fishing or don’t go around in a kayak, head confidently, in a bathing suit, towards the sea, a paddle board under their arm. No longer a truck or a highway, but a vast promenade, housing with large balconies, obviously bright offices, cafes with a view of the Opera. You can barely make out the port cranes in the distance.
It’s short, twenty years, with regard to the development of a city. Yet the contrast is striking. Because this second series of images represents what the immediate surroundings of the Oslo Opera district could look like in a handful of years. At least, these are the sixteen projects on which HAV Eiendom, the company in charge of redeveloping the capital’s seafront, wants to rely to draw the future face of Gronlikaia, where, today, containers are still piled up .
With Filipstad, on the other side of the bay, a large freight area and where ferries depart for northern Germany, it is one of the last districts promised to undergo a radical change on the edge of the fjord. Once these programs are completed, Oslo, which has experienced unprecedented development for three decades, can boast of having regained ten kilometers of direct access to the sea.
On the scale of this city of 700,000 inhabitants (more than a million in the conurbation) wedged between the sea and the hills, this reconquest of the fjord – an addition of several projects, in reality – represents only 9,000 new housing units among the 100,000 that could see the light of day. ‘here in 2050. But it is also, in the long term, 1.2 million square meters of offices, titanic works to bury a motorway, the construction of an opera and large museums which now serve as a showcase for this “small capital of a small country”, which was seeking a place on the international stage.
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