Sukkerbiten Photo gallery

The House of Photography floats with all its wheight over the harbour, building a bridge between the whitewashed stone base of the Opera House and the outer pier towards the Oslo fjord. As its neighbours, the building becomes an attraction in and of itself, exceeding in this sense, the programmatic function of the building. Where the Opera defines a public plaza on its roof and the Munch museum becomes a public viewing platform, the House of Photography becomes a pedestrian bridge. By establishing a new connection between the city and the fjord, the project exposes the social dimension of bridges – not only as an element that creates a connection and a movement, but also one which shape new encounters.

With a clear form, the building follows and strengthens the river mouths steady and calm movement along Bjørvika and Bispevika. A horizontal line acting as both a landscape element and as a building – a structure. At the same time, the building allows for the diagonal shapes of both the Opera and the Munch museum to take centre stage. The horizontality of the project frames – like a fragment of a picture frame – its context, reinforcing in this sense the composition of its monumental neighbouring institutions.

A dark strip in the light, a lightstrip in the dark