For 14 years, Snøhetta’s gleaming Oslo Opera House, with its walkable roofs of white Carrara marble, has dominated the cultural district where Oslo meets its namesake fjord. The architects of the city’s new central library, immediately inland from the opera, might have created a self-effacing building, rather than risk upstaging an icon. Instead, they turned a competition stricture meant to permanently protect views of the opera from the city’s central train station into a source of inspiration. The partnership of Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem angled their building away from the opera, leaving the sightlines from the station undisturbed, until it reaches about 60 feet in elevation, too high to block Snøhetta’s low-lying structure. At that point, the library’s 24-foot-high top floor cantilevers dramatically into the viewshed, from some angles appearing to fill a void created by the opera’s irregular roofline.
In addition to protecting views, the city required that buildings abutting the opera form a “uniform and neutral backdrop.” Oslo officials tried to persuade the library’s architects to make much of its exterior opaque, but “we were very convinced that the library should have a lot of daylight,” says Marius Mowe, a founder of Atelier Oslo. “So we argued for glass as the dominant material.” (The mosaic of clear, fritted, and textured glass, attached to GFRP columns filled with rock wool insulation, meets passive house standards.)
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