Photo by Borre Hostland

来自挪威国家博物馆的单调覆石立面
Stone-Clad Monotony at Norway’s National Museum

由专筑网江鹏，小R编译

在由Kleihues + Schuwerk事务所设计的挪威国家博物馆的开幕仪式上，博物馆的首任馆长Karin Hindsbo宣称：“有了这座新建筑，挪威就拥有了一座世界级的博物馆。”从某一方面来看，她的说法是对的，策展人与展览设计师Guicciardini和Magni Architetti，在80多个房间和一个3.2英亩的三层巨大展览空间中，编织了一个引人注目的国家物质生活发展的故事。这种可以永久性悬挂的展览空间，尤其是在工业化前的人工制品，是巧妙且富有创造性的。在11世纪与西方教会分裂之后，东正教的标志最终在挪威悬挂在钢架上；而19世纪早期激动人心的沙龙展览空间则是由简单的家具和音响布置出来的。从这方面来看，新博物馆取得了明显的成功。但这是否是世界级的建筑作品又是另一回事了。

而考虑到许多方面，此时新建国家博物馆是不合时宜的。大多数欧洲国家都只有一个综合博物馆，而那些没有（综合博物馆）的国家也拥有其他一系列令人印象深刻的博物馆，它们共同讲述了这个国家的历史故事。挪威人发现自己国家正是这样，但他们对此并不满意。2003年，这个国家着手将五个现有的机构，包括国家美术馆、装饰艺术与设计博物馆、建筑博物馆、当代艺术博物馆和国家巡回展览计划，合并成一个巨大的展览建筑。

At the opening of the new Kleihues + Schuwerk-designed National Museum of Norway, Karin Hindsbo, the institution’s first director, proclaimed that “with this new building, Norway has a world-class museum.” In one regard, she is right: the curators, together with exhibition designers Guicciardini & Magni Architetti, have woven together a compelling story of a nation’s material life across more than 80 rooms and a mighty 3.2 acres of exhibition space on three floors. The permanent hang, particularly of pre-industrial artifacts, is ingenious, vital, and creative. Eastern Orthodox icons that ended up in Norway following a schism with the western church in the 11th century hang on steel-strung frames; the exciting world of the early-19th-century post-independence salon is conjured out of simple furniture and soundscapes. In this, the museum is a clear success. Whether it is a world-class work of architecture is another matter.
In many ways, a new national museum is an anachronism. Most European countries have one, and those that don’t (e.g. Austria) boast a range of impressive museums that collectively tell the nation's material story. The Norwegians found themselves in just such a situation, but were not happy with it. In 2003, the country set out to combine five existing institutions—the National Gallery, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, the Museum of Architecture, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the state program for traveling exhibitions—into one immense facility.


Photo © Ina Wesenberg

这些建筑都是奥斯陆（Oslo）公共建筑中不可或缺的一部分，均是保持着适度的城市规模，即从郊区住宅到港口的三到五层的街区。幸运的是，这些迷人的建筑博物馆，作为一个令人愉悦的新古典主义建筑博物馆又被保留了下来；而其他建筑的命运仍尚未决定。Hindsbo在开幕致辞中表示，新建筑将比以前的建筑会更好地保护和展示藏品。即使是在耗资7.32亿美元的情况下，人们仍然希望项目能成功。

从积极的一面来看，Kleihues + Schuwerk设计的建筑在城市化方面表现良好。该建筑环绕在一个旧码头火车站的背面，留出了一个大庭院的空间。从码头上看，博物馆就像一个两层楼高的石头基座，顶部是一个两层高的大理石覆盖的亭子，两个亭子都藏在旧车站的后面。从西北方向看，它是一座四层的建筑，与附近的办公大楼相似。但从那时起，新的问题开始出现。

Each of these buildings was an integral piece of Oslo architecture that generally kept to the modest urban scale of three- to five-story blocks sloping down from residential suburbs to the harbor. (Mercifully, the charming architecture museum—a pleasant neo-classical building with a Sverre Fehn pavilion—is being retained as a museum; the fates of the others remain undecided.) Hindsbo suggested in her opening speech that the new building will help the museum care for and exhibit the collection better than the previous buildings. And at a cost of $732 million, one would certainly hope that it would.
On the positive side, Kleihues + Schuwerk’s building works well urbanistically. Leaving space for a large courtyard, the building wraps around the back of an old dockside railway station. From the dock, the museum is legible as a two-story stone plinth topped by a two-story marble-clad pavilion, both tucked behind the old station. From the northwest it appears as a four-story block appropriate in scale to nearby office blocks. But from thereon in, problems begin to arise.


Photo © Annar Bjorgli

自从博物馆首次规划以来，一个由各种公共机构推动的主要城市更新项目已经在博物馆周边的Bjørvika和Tjuvholmen的滨水地区展开。该项目的关键建筑是Snøhetta设计的国家歌剧院（2008），它巧妙地坐落在码头内而不是岸边，其倾斜的屋顶为城市提供了一个新的大理石覆盖的公共空间。遗憾的是，新开发的其他建筑作品缺乏了国家歌剧院的独创性和材料质量。

Atelier Oslo和Lund Hagem合作的Deichmann图书馆（2021年）有一个围绕三个公共交通核心的华丽内部空间，但它的玻璃钢外观无法与相邻的国家歌剧院的粗野主义几何结构相协调。很难想象像Astudio Herreros事务所设计的Munch博物馆（2021年）这样几乎不传达内容的博物馆，它看起来像首尔或新加坡的那种豪华酒店，而不是19世纪资产阶级心中渴望的故乡。但综合来看，码头区的发展不仅缺乏城市其他地区具有的建筑多样性。而且，更重要的是建筑的材料多样性：这是一个砖的城，拥有各种各样的石头、木材、巴洛克风格的灰泥，而考虑到奥斯陆拥有众多粗野主义派的建筑，混凝土也会是不错的选择。

国家博物馆的设计构思和建造与不断增长的港口社区相呼应。虽然附近的开发项目很新奇，但低矮、极简主义的国家博物馆却被认为代表了过去的那个时代。建筑师Klaus Schuwerk在开幕式上这样描述它。遗憾的是，为了达到这种效果而采用的关键设计措施——在建筑的大部分外部覆盖上横切纹理的片岩是一个失败的策略。近距离观察建筑，这里使用的灰色和白色材料提供了视觉趣味和分层的纹理。然而，从更远处看，所有的细微差别都消失了。Kleihues + Schuwerk事务所使用石材覆层作为耐久性、不变性、甚至严肃性的代名词，但其覆盖的建筑面积超过了26万平方英尺，整体表现效果是单调的。

Since the museum was first planned, a major urban renewal project promoted by various public agencies has rolled out across the waterside districts of Bjørvika and Tjuvholmen that the museum overlooks. The project’s key building is Snøhetta’s celebrated National Opera (2008), which sits, ingeniously, within the dock rather than on its bank, and offers the city a new marble-clad public space on its sloping rooftop. Unfortunately, the rest of the new development lacks the National Opera’s originality and material quality.
Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem’s Deichmann Library (2021) has a gorgeous interior oriented around three public circulation cores, but its glass-and-steel exterior cannot reconcile with the quasi-brutalist geometries of the adjacent National Opera. And it is hard to imagine a museum that communicates as little of its content as the estudio Herreros-designed Munch Museum (2021), which looks like the kind of luxury hotel one might see in Seoul or Singapore rather than a home to portraits of 19th-century bourgeois anxiety. Taken together, the dockland developments lack not just the architectural variety of the rest of the city but also, and perhaps more importantly, its material variety: this is a city of brick; all manner of stone; wood; stucco in the baroque mode; and, given Oslo’s collection of superb brutalist buildings, concrete.
The National Museum, conceived and built in parallel with the growing harbor neighborhood, is intended as a counterpoint. Whereas nearby developments are novelties, the low, minimalist National Museum is supposed to speak of the ages. Architect Klaus Schuwerk certainly described it as such at the opening. Sadly, the critical design move employed to achieve this effect—cladding most of the building’s exterior in schist stone cut across its grain—is a failure. Up close, the gray-and-white varieties used here provide visual interest and layered texture. Viewed from further afield, however, all nuance is lost. Kleihues + Schuwerk have used the stone cladding as a shorthand for the values of durability, immutability, even seriousness, but the effect—over 260,000 square feet of the building is covered in it—is monotonous.


Photo © Iwan Baan

这块由各种灰色相互搭配的石头既不吸引人，也不具有功能， Klaus Schuwerk显然是一个热衷于历史的学者，他可能会停下来问问自己，考虑到片岩在挪威如此常见，为什么这种石头以前没有被这样使用过。从西面看，这座四层楼高的建筑点缀着四排铝框玻璃，令人惊讶地单调乏味，西南立面也好不到哪里去。从城市来到这里，人们可以绕过两个长长的石头立面，然后看到两个面对着主入口的庭院立面。只有“光厅”（Light Hall），即石砌基座顶上的大理石亭子。它让人感到宽慰，晚上，它半透明的立面从内部被照亮，变成一块温暖的发光板，其效果与码头对面歌剧院开放式甲板类似。

更令人失望的是，走进这座建筑，发现一个大厅，比例匀称，有15英尺高的天花板和宽阔的门口，但却排列着同样无穷无尽的细脉片岩。室内的理想效果似乎是一个超大的巴塞罗那馆，但尽管国家博物馆的大量黑色石头模仿了该建筑的奢华现代主义，它最终未能达到相同的色调和材料的轻盈感。这块石头沿着墙壁一直延伸到地下室的厕所和衣帽间，有一种夜店入口的沉闷威胁感。而且在某种程度上，不像密斯·凡·德·罗的设计手法，石墙的隔断阻碍了厨房入口和上层楼梯的视线。当然楼上的情况也不是很好。建筑师们下定决心不做一座古根海姆式的博物馆，也就是说，不愿从他们的作品中抹去所有雕塑的痕迹，而他们所做的只是一个非常昂贵的盒子。

Nor is the stone particularly attractive or versatile: shades of grey on shades of grey. Klaus Schuwerk is clearly a keen student of history, but he might pause and ask himself why, given that schist is so common in Norway, the stone has not been used in this way before. Seen from the west, the four-story block, punctuated with four lines of aluminum-framed glazing, is astonishingly drab, and the southwest facade is little better. Arriving from the city, one walks around two long facades of the stone, only to then be greeted by two more facades facing onto the courtyard where the main entrance is located. Only the "Light Hall," the marble-clad pavilion atop the stone-clad plinth, offers relief: at night, its translucent facade, lit from within, becomes a glowing slab of warm light with a similar effect to that of the Opera House’s open deck across the dock.
It’s a further disappointment to enter the building and find a lobby that is well-proportioned with 15-foot-high ceilings and wide doorways but is lined with the same endless swathes of veiny schist. The desired effect of the interior generally seems to be that of an oversized Barcelona Pavilion, but while the National Museum’s sheer mass of dark stone apes the luxurious modernism of that building, it ultimately fails to achieve the same tonal and material lightness. (Lining the walls down to the basement toilets and cloakrooms, the stone has the dreary menace of a Hamburg nightclub entrance.) And in a manner unlike that of Mies, partitions of stone pointlessly block views to the galley entrances and staircases to the upper level. Nor are things much better upstairs. So determined have the architects been not to make a Guggenheim—that is, to erase all traces of sculpture from their work—that what they’ve made instead is a very expensive box.


Photo © Iwan Baan

在楼上，二楼画廊和两个中央休息室之间的分隔过于明显。后者又大又不吸引人，而精心设计的空间再次成为唯一真正吸引人的地方。甚至来到这些地方都显得是一种怜悯。与较低楼层的画廊相比，它们的色彩不那么丰富，而是以同样的方式排列：在一个网格中，可以一行行或跨行探索，为游客提供选择自己路径的机会。这些空间再次经过精心设计，由几乎覆盖整个天花板的低照度LED组成的大面板面板从上方柔和地照亮，创造出自然光的效果。“光厅”（Light Hall）的建筑面积（2.6万平方英尺）或许适合举办一个参观展，但它的天花板高达23英尺（约合2米），给人的感觉就像谷仓一样高大。该博物馆的挪威当代艺术开幕展试图去缓解其带来的巨构感。

一个世界级的博物馆能在一座令人印象深刻的建筑里举办吗？这位评论家之前可能会说不。然而，在国家博物馆，你完全有可能花一整天的时间沉浸在充满活力的中世纪挂毯，非凡的玻璃和银器收藏，或通过其现代艺术、建筑和设计讲述的一个国家的近代故事中，而不是去想它们所在的建筑。幸运的是，博物馆所呈现的内容仍然可以决定这一切。

Upstairs, the division between the second-floor galleries and two central lounges is overly stark. The latter are large and uninviting and the curated spaces are again the only real attraction. It is a mercy to be back in these spaces. Less rich in color than the galleries on the lower floor, they are arrayed in the same way: in a grid, which can be explored along the rows or across them; providing an opportunity for visitors to choose their own paths. The spaces are again well-designed and gently lit from above by large panels of low-lux LEDs that cover almost the entirety of the ceiling, and create the effect of natural light. The “Light Hall,” by contrast, may have the appropriate floor space for a visiting exhibition (26,000 square feet), but it feels tall and barn-like with a 23-foot ceiling. The museum’s opening exhibition of contemporary Norwegian art struggled to address its vastness.
Can a world class museum be hosted in an underwhelming building? This reviewer would previously have said no. However, at the National Museum, it is quite possible to spend a full day immersed in vibrant medieval tapestries, remarkable collections of glass and silverware, or the more recent story of a nation told through its modern art, architecture, and design, and not think about the building in which they are housed. Content, mercifully, can still be everything.  


Photo © Iwan Baan


Photo © Iwan Baan


Photo © Iwan Baan


Photo © Iwan Baan