On a hot day in late spring, I arrive in Oslo for an exhibition at the Norwegian National Museum. I am poised to unpick the “New Nordic” aesthetic, which has, over the past two decades, grown into a regional brand of sorts — stretching from angular architecture to cool contemporary ceramics and tweezer food. But as I emerge from the city’s central station, I am faced with a celebration of Old Nordic. It is Norway’s Constitution Day, a national holiday, and the streets are bustling with bunads.
The Norwegian national costume, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, is a romantic spectacle of folk embroidery inspired by rose painting and woodcarving. Waves of people proudly wearing them swell through a cityscape now punctuated by sharp-edged 21st-century buildings, such as in Bjørvika, a residential quarter on the edge of the Oslo fjord that also includes a row of tall, thin offices known as The Barcode. At the heart of Bjørvika is the new Munch Museum, considered by many as the nadir of the city’s contemporary architecture. When it opened in 2021, it was voted “the ugliest building in Norway” in a poll organised by Arkitekturopprøret (Architectural Uprising), a group founded in Sweden in 2014 campaigning for new progressive styles that fit with classical or local tradition.
New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place explores a distinctive movement that, argues co-curator Martin Braathen, has united Nordic architects, artisans, furniture designers and chefs since the turn of the millennium in shaping a locally focused approach to lifestyle design. Its guiding principles are the use of regional materials, a lack of decoration or strong colours, a belief in sustainability codes and a — hotly contested — foundation in authenticity.
But it seems that despite this quarter of a century retrospective celebration, architecture is becoming something of a fly in the ointment. And few places more so than Oslo. In the 15 years I’ve been coming to this city, the skyline has changed beyond recognition. There are two Oslos: the old and the new, the former revered by the public, the latter championed by a particular cohort of architects and property developers.
In the exhibition, Braathen uses the rise of the Nordic super-chef as his chief protagonist. “A ramson picked in the local forest is as exclusive as imported caviar, and your grandmother’s old recipe is more important than the one in the cookbook,” he says. The local and the traditional are key springboards for innovation. “This attitude has spread into other disciplines as both an ethos and an aesthetic.”

Take Nordic tableware. Like the little rock pools of foraged seaweed they hold, many contemporary ceramics in the New Nordic vein also look to the landscape. Michelin-starred restaurants, such as Maaemo in Oslo, use locally crafted crockery. Sissel Wathne, a Lillehammer-based Danish ceramicist whose pieces can be seen in the National Museum exhibition, believes that the new is rooted in the old. Her work embraces traditional glazes created from foraged reindeer bones. “You can’t use industrial raw materials; I have to go to the mountains and collect them and grind them,” she says.
Critics complain that Nordic architects have moved away from this ethos and are instead working in a self-referential bubble. Old Nordic apartment buildings are much loved for their distinctive high ceilings and ornate detailing. The concern is that these qualities are being lost in the name of sustainability and notions of progress.
Saher Sourouri, an Oslo psychologist who is the spokesperson for Architectural Uprising, argues that: “Most modern architecture [in Norway] has this poverty [of beauty]. There’s a lack of stimulation, there’s very little going on.” We are having coffee at a café in Frogner, the kind of unchanged historic neighbourhood he favours. If buildings tell a story, he says, then contemporary Nordic houses lack a narrative arc. “The facades are very simple, very boring. They’re flat. There’s no ornamentation. The windows are often asymmetrical. It’s all minimalistic.” And this aesthetic has become ubiquitous, he claims: “A lot of people wonder why everything has to be the same.”

Developments in the Oslo neighbourhoods of Storo and Løren have been the most heavily criticised. And the campaigners are not just pensioners with a penchant for 18th-century proportions: Architectural Uprising has some 150,000 followers on social media (the number is equivalent to around 20 per cent of Oslo’s population). “On Instagram, about 60 per cent are under the age of 35,” says Sourouri. “The younger generation are much more interested in the classical and traditional styles of architecture than people my age or older,” he asserts.
While architectural trends in the wider region have broadly shifted, Norway, with its newfound oil wealth (a popular Norwegian football chant goes: “We can buy all of Sweden, if we want to”), has had an accelerated rate of change, argues Sourouri. The “Snøhetta effect” has seen a wide range of practices adopt the monochrome palettes and rocky silhouettes favoured by Snøhetta, the Norwegian architectural practice behind buildings such as the iceberg-like Oslo Opera House and the grass-roofed Bjellandsbu-Åkrafjorden Cabin in the wilderness south of Bergen.


While it is celebrated for its foregrounding of sustainability, rooting to the landscape and social responsibility, there is a pinch point between striving to create a new design and architectural language and connection to national heritage. And while design elements at the Snøhetta tip of the pyramid are often seen as inspiring, the style adopted by bigger housing developments, much like the ideas of haute couture filtering down to the high street, can be less impressive. Sourouri describes the apartment blocks in Bjørvika as “cheap, colourless and bland”.
Oslo’s population has grown 40 per cent since 2000, and the number of dwellings has increased by 63,500 since 2006, according to Statistics Norway. All this, when the city is surrounded by forest on three sides and a fjord on the fourth, all of which are protected. Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museum, one of the first contemporary buildings on the waterfront when it opened in 2012, describes the rate of new housing development as “insane”.
“You have neighbourhoods where you had villas with their large eplehagen, their apple gardens,” she says. “But then came developers, real estate and money. People started to sell the gardens. All of a sudden you sit and you look at all these square buildings. They’re made cheaply, efficiently; they all have their garage in the basement and building on top. They are cubes.” She also says that construction work, concrete and tarmacking has been blamed for poor water drainage. Uniformity and environmental damage would be at odds with the New Nordic ethos.

For Sourouri and his fellow rebels, the issue is about both taste and the wellbeing of residents. “There is a difference between what architects like and think is the right way to build buildings today and what a large part of the general public think,” he argues. “A discussion I was drawn into was that you cannot talk about ugly and beautiful buildings: it’s simplistic, it’s populist and architecture is far more complex. But almost everyone talks about ugly and beautiful buildings.” On Instagram he can be heard saying: “You have to wear horse blinders when you walk in new parts of town just to protect your sanity.”
But not all locals agree. “I love the new houses in Bjørvika,” says Norwegian author Martine Jonsrud. “They have a very maritime feel, the walls remind me of fish skin and the shapes are like Tetris, or big puzzles for children. It’s playful and stylish.”

Both the uprising and the city’s Heritage Office have caused architects to adapt their approach. A mixed-used building by Mad Arkitekter in Oslo’s Torshov neighbourhood in the north of the city had to be rethought after its original Lego-like designs were rejected by planning officials in 2014. It took nearly a decade to come to a compromise. The result: an update of a more traditional Scandinavian style. “In recent years, the Arkitekturopprøret [Architectural Uprising] movement has contributed to a broader acceptance of such harmonious and context-sensitive expressions, and to a renewed discussion around beauty in architecture, clearly addressing a sense of longing shared by many,” says Kurt Singstad, a partner at Mad Arkitekter.
Other Norwegians have found a sweet spot between the old and new. One is Eirik Sevaldsen, proprietor of Panu, a restaurant on St Olavs Plass that plays with unexpected mixes — turbot, lobster, rhubarb — just as the design of his home on the west coast of Norway blends elements from different eras.

“It was my wife’s old family home,” explains Sevaldsen. “Her grandfather built the place in the early 1930s, he was a carpenter. It’s an old house, a classical house. When we took it over, some people said: just build a new house.” Instead, the couple supported the original structure and built a contemporary oblong extension with a vast glass window overlooking the Atlantic, the two parts unified by the use of stone from Alta in the north of Norway. Two styles from different times complementing one another, like accessorising a bunad with a beanie.
“New Nordic: Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place”, Norwegian National Museum, Oslo, until September 14; nasjonalmuseet.no/en
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