Vicarious Contextualism

This self-containment does not mean that resonances and indirect references are ignored. The building’s envelope is made of black composite slats that are formed and treated to partially evoke the black-stained wood found on medieval Scandinavian stave churches and Viking longships. A deep material sensibility is transformed through contemporary material logic to vicariously connect the building to iconic Norwegian objects without defaulting to direct quotation of adjacent buildings.

Deferred Interiority

Hidden inside the building mass is a vast space containing a nested object, which is sometimes tightly fitted and sometimes loosely fitted to the outer shell. The interstitial space between the nested object and the outer shell becomes a flexible, civic realm for opening events, symposia, and lectures. While visitors in this space are technically inside the building, they remain outside of something else—the nested object—and thus the expected separation between world and interior is deferred.

No Ground

Exhibition spaces are located both within the nested object and inside the thick poché spaces of the outer shell. Visitors ascend into the museum via escalators embedded into the shell and through the inner object’s central core. Circulating through the museum, visitors find themselves momentarily suspended above a deep, almost geological chasm as bridges and stairs cross over the interstitial space. Rather than experiencing a fluid continuum of art, visitors must leap between worlds, culminating in a sense that there is no ground.