Staging Openness through Atmosphere at the Oslo Opera House

Abstract

Openness is a term often found in relation with urban development projects that seek to add social value to the built environment, not least within the context of Nordic welfare cities. In this article, we explore the Oslo Opera House (OOH) as an example of contemporary Nordic architecture and interrogate its purported openness through an atmospheric lens. Our study is based on extensive fieldwork and unfolds using three interconnecting generators of atmosphere: materials, light, and movement. We argue that openness is paradoxically shaped through partial atmospheric enclosures, and further suggest that understanding the workings of atmospheres is crucial to coming to terms with how our contemporary urban spaces are produced and experienced.

Keywords:

• Atmosphere
• light
• materiality
• movement
• Nordic architecture
• openness
• Oslo Opera House
• welfare spaces

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our colleagues from within the project team, especially Mikkel Bille and David Pinder, who provided generous and helpful feedback on an earlier draft. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions, along with Oda Fagerlund, whose fieldwork material we draw on along with our own.

Notes

1. See Andrew Smith and Ingvild von Krogh Strand, “Oslo’s New Opera House: Cultural Flagship, Regeneration Tool or Destination Icon?” European Urban and Regional Studies 18, no. 1 (2011): 93–110.

2. See https://snohetta.com/project/42-norwegian-national-opera-and-ballet.

3. Smith and Strand, “Oslo’s New Opera House,” 103–104.

4. Statsbygg, “New Opera House” (2005). Oslo: Statsbygg.

5. Carl Marklund, “Open Skies, Open Minds? Shifting Concepts of Communication and Information in Swedish Public Debate,” in The Paradox of Openness: Transparency and Participation in Nordic Cultures of Consensus, eds. Norbert Götz and Carl Marklund (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 246.

6. Peter MacKeith, Reflections on a Nordic Public Architecture in New Nordic: Architecture & Identity (Humlebæk: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 139.

7. By employing an atmospheric lens, we both approach the OOH as a space that is full of atmosphere (atmospherically staged) and explore it through atmosphere. In other words, atmosphere provides us with a way into the space as both something to explore and a mode of exploring. See Gernot Böhme, “Contribution to the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy,” Thesis Eleven 73 (2003): 71–82; Atmospheric Architectures: The Esthetics of Felt Spaces (London: Bloomsbury, 2017).

 8. Hjørdis Brandrup Kortbek et al., “The Participatory Agenda – A Post-Critical, Anticipatory Intervention,” Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidskrift 19, no. 1 (2016): 19–35; cf. Philip Kotler, “Atmospherics as a Marketing Tool,” Journal of Retailing 49 (1974): 48–64.

 9. Gitte Marling, Ole B. Jensen, and Hans Kiib, “The Experience City: Planning of Hybrid Cultural Projects,” European Planning Studies 17, no. 6 (2009): 863–885.

10. Ben Anderson and James Ash, “Atmospheric Methods,” in Nonrepresentational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, ed. Philip Vannini (New York: Routledge, 2015), 48.

11. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 92.

12. Marianne Ibler, foreword to A New Golden Age: Nordic Architecture & Design, ed. Marianne Ibler (Aarhus: Archipress M., 2014), 6.

13. Åsne Dahl Haugsevje et al., “Kultur for å delta – Når kulturpolitiske idealer skal realiseres i praktisk kulturarbeid,” Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidskrift 19, no. 1 (2016): 80.

14. Bjarki Valtýsson, “Not cool, but cosy: Five perspectives on Nordic city cultural policies,” Nordisk kulturpolitisk tidskrift 19, no. 2 (2016): 183.

15. Jan Gehl, Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987). In a wider sense, these ideas have developed along with thinkers from abroad, e.g., the likes of Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961) and William H Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988).

16. Marklund, “Open Skies, Open Minds?” 144; see also Tom Nielsen, “The Making of Democratic Urban Public Space in Denmark,” in Public Space Design and Social Cohesion: An International Comparison, eds. Patricia Aelbrecht and Quentin Stevens (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 37–57.

17. John Allen, “Ambient Power: Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz and the Seductive Logic of Public Spaces,” Urban Studies 43, no. 2 (2006): 441–455; Böhme, “Contribution to the Critique;” Jürgen Hasse, “Atmospheres as Expressions of Medial Power: Understanding Atmospheres in Urban Governance and Under Self-Guidance,” Lebenswelt 4, no. 2 (2014): 214–229.

18. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Withdrawing from Atmosphere: An Ontology of Air Partitioning and Affective Engineering,” Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 34, no. 1 (2016): 151.

19. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 92.

20. Matthew Gandy “Urban Atmospheres,” Cultural Geographies 24, no. 2 (2017): 357.

21. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 23.

22. Ibid., 92.

23. Hasse, “Atmospheres as Expressions,” 214.

24. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, 23.

25. Anderson and Ash, “Atmospheric Methods,” 35.

26. Interview with a Snøhetta representative at their Oslo office, October 2019.

27. Interview with local user, Oslo Opera House, January 2020.

28. Henrik Syse, “After the Tragedy: Reflections on Norwegian Values,” in Nordic Ways, eds. András Simonyi and Debra Cagan (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2016), 73.

29. Kirsten Wagle and Astrid Løvaas, “Wagle and Løvaas (Norway),” in Art Textiles of the World: Scandinavia, ed. Matthew Koumis (Bristol: Telos Art Publishing, 2004), 103.

30. Charles Lock, “Glass Glimpsed: In, On, Through, and Beyond,” in Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture, eds. Henriette Steiner and Kristin Veel (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015), 6.

31. Aki Ishida, Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture: Material, Culture, and Technology (London: Routledge, 2020), 1.

32. Cf. Mikkel Bille, Peter Bjerregaard, and Tim Flohr Sørensen, “Staging Atmospheres: Materiality, Culture, and the Texture of the In-Between.” Emotion, Space and Society 15 (2015): 31–38.

33. Henry Plummer, Nordic Light: Modern Scandinavian Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 100.

34. Interview with two local women, Oslo Opera House, July 2020.

35. Interview with a Snøhetta representative at their Oslo office, October 2019.

36. Interview with a local woman and her children, Oslo Opera House, July 2020.

37. Richard Marshall, introduction to Waterfronts in Post-Industrial Cities, ed. Richard Marshall (London: Spon Press, 2001), 5.

38. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin, “Introduction: Making the Action Visible: Making Environments in Northern Landscapes,” in Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, eds. Dolly Jørgensen and Sverker Sörlin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013), 3.

39. Interview with an employee, Oslo Opera House, October 2019.

40. Interview with a Snøhetta representative at their Oslo office, October 2019.

41. Plummer, Nordic Light, 46.

42. Interview with a local, Oslo Opera House, July 2020.

43. Gandy, “Urban Atmospheres,” 365.

44. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, “Withdrawing from Atmosphere,” 154.

45. Interview with a Snøhetta representative at their Oslo office, October 2019.

46. Interview with an employee, Oslo Opera House, October 2019.

47. Interview with a local guide, Oslo Opera House, July 2019.

48. Karen A. Franck and Quentin Stevens, Loose Space: Possibility and Diversity in Urban Life (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 14.

49. Interview with a local choreographer, Oslo Opera House, October 2019.

50. Interview with two local women, Oslo Opera House, July 2019.

51. Jürgen Weidinger, “Designing Atmospheres in Landscape Architecture,” in Designing Atmospheres in Landscape Architecture, ed. Jürgen Weidinger (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2018), 25.

52. Interview with two young locals, Oslo Opera House, February 2020.

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out as part of the Living with Nordic Lighting project, funded by the Velux Foundation [grant number 16998].

Notes on contributors

Jeremy Payne-Frank

Jeremy Payne-Frank is a PhD fellow at Roskilde University. His research focuses on the relationship between architecture and urban development, specifically the use of art, light, and atmosphere in a Nordic context.

Siri Schwabe

Siri Schwabe is an anthropologist and Assistant Professor at Roskilde University. She is interested in urban development as an everyday phenomenon and has approached this topic mainly through post-industrial heritage and atmosphere, focusing on the Nordic region. Her previous research explored encounters of memory in Santiago de Chile.