The Nobel Peace Center – Adjaye Associates
2002 competition winners Adjaye Associates were selected for an ambitious £14.5 million project in Norway’s capital, Oslo - to create a permanent museum of the Nobel Peace Prize; a building of the highest ideals; a spotlight for individuals who have strived to make peace in the world.
On arrival, visitors are confronted with a punctured rectangular steel box; juxtaposed with the Italianate façade of the old building, Oslo’s former Vestbanen railway station. The perforations at first appear random; but in plan, all is revealed. The holes make up a stylized map of the world, arranged by centres of conflict. In case you miss this discreet geographical gesture, a display just inside the museum foyer mimics the same idea and if you listen closely, each hole tells something of its story.
Take a few steps further and you are confronted with the “Café de la Paix” restaurant where Adjaye worked with his long-term collaborator, and Turner Prize winner, Chris Ofili – who devised a predominantly green geometric pattern that deliberately jars with the reception area opposite; where every surface is coated in a high gloss, hot red finish.
Upstairs the exhibition becomes far more high-tech. Alfred Nobel’s story is narrated through a huge interactive book; a novel of blank pages projected on from above; and when you point your hands to an image on the page, menus drop down, images appear on the wall, and you are educated on what initially caught your interest. As you reach the story of Nobel’s travels, an opaque projection screen ahead of you turns transparent to reveal a window to Oslo’s harbor. Totally magical.
This is all before you encounter Adjaye’s greatest achievement in the refurbished train station; the “Nobel Field”.
Working alongside American display technologist David Small, Adjaye has created a dark purple room from opaque laminated glass awash with calming ambient tones that flow across the room on a pond of plastic limbs, each with a colour changing LED light at the tip. Individual information screens sway lazily in the space, each accounting the lives of past prizewinners in soothing tranquility a nod to what they each strived to achieve in their lives. Peace.
Steve Wilkinson
Tags: Adjaye Associates, Chris Ofili, David Small, Nobel Peace Center, Oslo
