THE BUILDING

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 modernism’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 modernism 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.

Related tendencies also existed in other countries in Europe. At the beginning of the1950s, the French architect Le Corbusier began work on Ronchamp – a church for Catholic pilgrims. The result of his efforts was extraordinarily “expressive”. He himself described the building as a space specially created for spiritual concentration and meditation, and believed that the traditional, Spartan language of modernism was inappropriate. His solution was a sort of cave-like interior, where “mystical” light streamed into the building through small holes and slits. A kind of vaulting spans the interior – it seems to hover above the space, yet has a feeling of weight about it. To give the building presence and solidity, Le Corbusier designed a tower, which rose out of the sculptural mass of the building.

The church at Ronchamp was undoubtedly one of the most astounding buildings of the post-war era. It showed us that architecture was once again on its way to becoming art, and that the way forward was to use forms that expressed the “content” of the building. This is the background for our interpretation of the term “Neo-Expressionism”.

Common to these new endeavours was the desire to create some form of “expressive space”. Modern architecture’s prophet, Siegfried Giedion, put it like this: “Humans need buildings that are something more than purely functional. They need symbols for their own actions, beliefs and faith. In other words, people need monuments, or ‘things that commemorate’”. This need was fulfilled in two ways: firstly, spaces were transformed into something more than abstract “containers” (which was the case during the late modernist period), and secondly, the built form was given a tangible character of its own. The danger with this expressive way of thinking was of course that the very “expressiveness” often degenerated into a superficial game, or misuse of effects for their own sake, and indeed, a large number of rather strange buildings took shape around the world. When an architect grasped the idea of designing a space that corresponded to the tasks or actions that would be carried out within it, and
understood that form was an active expression of such basic physical actions such as standing, getting up, stretching, opening and shutting, Neo-Expressionism became meaningful and important.

This is the framework within which we should view Eikvar and Engebretsen’s Art Centre at Høvikodden. Their building is not meant to be an abstract container, but is a specific answer to the external and internal “situation”. I wrote a review of their solution for Prisma no. 1, which was published to coincide with the inauguration of the Art Centre. In it I wrote the following: “The building site is, as the name suggests (Høvikodden: in Norwegian odde = headland), on a headland jutting into the Oslo Fjord. The approach from the north leads towards a spectacularly beautiful knoll, from which visitors can admire a stunning panoramic view. Eikvar and Engebretsen took advantage of this special situation by designing a fan-shaped building, with the main entrance at the pivotal point of the fan. By doing so, they also fulfilled the main functional demand that was set: all areas were to be accessible from the foyer.”

Their solution was the result of a very clear idea involving not only an innovative room plan with a system of connecting walkways between the main spaces, but also an underlying, constructive principle that provided order and stability without weakening the desired spatial freedom. As already mentioned, this is quite different from the traditional, modernist “free plan”. At Høvikodden, there is a kind of “growth pattern” that generates different kinds of spaces, rather than one, isotropic space that is divided by freestanding walls. One might also say that the rooms have become more “concrete”; they seem to belong to a living organism rather than a mathematical system of coordinates. This is also evident in the tangible texture of the exterior walls. I wrote the following in 1968: “Inside the flowing, varied, yet systematically organized space, the exhibition areas are firmly placed as individual, static rooms. The openings that lead towards each of them are incised into the monumental walls like deep holes – they tell us that we are about to enter a different world.” The beautiful, improbable, overhead lighting underlines this. We are no longer in the “real” world of the vestibule and the walkways that connect it to these inner spaces. We are in the world of art, the world of the “sacred”.

So where is the Art Centre at Høvikodden on the map of post-war architecture – in terms of development within the field, and as an individual work? The building is of great interest – its varied and expressive form certainly contributed to enriching modern architecture. It not only broke with the commonly accepted perceptions of architecture at the time, but also opened up the way for a new, fruitful range of possibilities.

Twenty-six years later, in 1994, the building was extended, and a two-storey wing with exhibition spaces and technical rooms was added. This project was designed by the same architects – the new wing abuts the main body of the building as an organic extension. In 2003, yet another extension was made, this time in the form of an annex that extends into the outdoor park, connected to the main building by a passage leading from the lower level. The building was donated by the Norwegian gallerist, Haaken A. Christensen, and was designed by the architect Stein Halvorsen. He chose wood as the main material for the project, in contrast to the main volume of the building, which is constructed from concrete and aluminium. Today, the total building area is approximately 9,500 square metres, of which 3,500 are occupied by exhibition spaces.

The essay is taken from the book The Henie Onstad Art Centre: The Art of Tomorrow Today : The Collection by Karin Hellandsjø, Torino : Skira, 2008