Oslo City Hall, which sits close to the harbor, cuts an ominous figure. From the outside it’s a severe, utilitarian, proto-Brutalist building. From the inside, however, it’s an eye-popping fantasia of color and pattern. Each of its stately-proportioned public rooms, including its high central hall, is finished with sumptuous mosaics, murals, wall coverings and draperies. The rich colors and patterns aren’t what one expects inside an institutional building, and certainly not inside the one in which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded. (What is entirely Nobel-appropriate is the gentle white light that falls through the clerestories in the central hall.)
There’s an intensity to the interior design that’s a bit nutty, especially in relation to what we understand as the inherent restraint of Scandinavian design. (Civic buildings in Copenhagen and Stockholm are richly appointed too, but don’t have this intensity.) Even the ceilings in Oslo City Hall are extravagantly embellished, finished with murals, colored tiles, and gigantic, space-age pendant lights. Our travel guide, an Oslo native, told us that Norwegians typically “found their own way to live,” and that sense of inventiveness and individuality is evident inside Town Hall. What’s most remarkable is how the building’s sober exterior supports a pulsating, eccentric inner life, and how at ease they are with one another.