Henie Onstad Art Centre

Profil

The Henie Onstad Art Centre is stunningly located on a headland jutting into the Oslo Fjord in Bærum, approximately 10 km south of Oslo. When the architecture competition for a new museum was announced in 1962, 95 project proposals were submitted. After a tie-breaking round involving five of the projects, the young Norwegian architects Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen were chosen. The building swiftly gained an international reputation when it first opened, and, to this day, it remains one of the nation's most important cultural sites. To mark the Art Centre's 20th anniversary in 1988, Christian Norberg-Schulz, professor of architecture, wrote an article about it entitled "The Art Centre and Post-War Architecture". It is still highly relevant today, and selected passages are cited below:

The Henie Onstad Art Centre was the first significant manifestation of Neo-Expressionism in Norway. Does the fact that our attitude towards architecture has changed mean that the building no longer holds any interest? It would be short-sighted to believe so. Though architecture continues to change and develop as it has always done, important buildings have qualities that survive, and retain their meaning. In my view, the Art Centre at Høvikodden is such a building.

Jon Eikvar and Sven Erik Engebretsen's winning proposal for the architecture competition represented a conscious effort to create a more "expressive" form of architecture. Around the 1960s, modern architecture was certainly in need of a renaissance such as this. The sheer number of new buildings erected during the post-war period had revealed modern ism's limited possibilities, and both in Norway and abroad our surroundings had become characterless and schematic. However, there were also positive tendencies. In Scandinavia in particular, a more "organic" view of architecture was evolving. The now renowned originator of this view was the Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, who had enriched the stark, visual language of modern ism with the use of natural forms and materials as early as 1930. Aalto's aim was twofold: to create an architecture that was more humane, and to create the kind of architecture that was firmly rooted in a cultural tradition that centred around the home. These aims came to have a significant impact on the other Nordic countries. Although his buildings were essentially "Finnish", the principles that lay behind them were of common interest to the Nordic countries in particular. As a continuation of this concept, Jørn Utzon created a similarly "Danish" style of architecture.