There’s been a fuss about the contents of Karl Knausgård’s memoir, particularly the account of his father’s descent into alcoholism and death. That description centers on the house in small-town Norway where the senior Knaussgård passed his final days, which is, when the writer and his brother arrive, layered in filth, and presided over by his still-happily-imbibing grandmother. The pages describing the storm of soiled laundry, food scraps, and bottles inside are terrifically vivid. The house has already been proclaimed one of the Top 10 Homes in Literature by one newspaper. (While the American paperback features an irrelevant splatter painting, the UK version features a white wood frame house.)

What I found most remarkable about the memoir weren’t the familial revelations (grandmother peeing in her seat) or brutal emotional honesty (apathy towards an about-to-give-birth wife), but the vividness of the physical descriptions. Even in translation (and the imaginative leap from Norwegian into English must be a big one) those passages that simply describe a thing (any thing, really) shine through. Each object is alive, a character that acts importantly on the author’s internal life. When just he, his brother and grandmother are inside the house “the rooms seemed to close around what had happened, as though we were too weak to open them." And after it’s is cleaned out and the windows are thrown open, "the movement of the air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the second floor, allowed the house to open up, in a sense, and become a place the world flooded through…" It’s a wonderful way to write about buildings.

August 07, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The splash image of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, by Snøhetta, on the architect’s website is a powerful one. In that photo, taken after a snowfall, the building looks like: mountain, iceberg, fortress and ocean liner. When the building is approached on foot from the city center, on a temporary steel footbridge, over a road that will be eventually channeled underground, the building is actually lower, broader and less imposing. It looks like: spaceship, folly, and something-still-under-construction. It has no center and no front, no strong image at all. It just barely looks like a building.

While the artfully sloping structure (this sloping is Snøhetta’s signature) feels as if it’s going to tumble into the water, it actually directs one back to the city. Its roof, clad in blindingly-white travertine tiles, can be occupied like a landform. As one steps up and walks the perimeter Oslo emerges all around as a modern commercial city, thick with with towers and cranes. And as one turns back to the building itself, its peaks emerge and recede cinematically in a way that’s pleasingly disorienting. The roof is public park, promenade and theater. The evening I visited people sat facing a floating stage listening to a soundcheck for the following evening’s Justin Bieber concert. To get back to our hotel, where The Biebs was in residence, we had to navigate a crowd of swooning, screaming and stampeding pre-teen girls. It’s impressive that such a cerebral, elegant building could host, comfortably, this kind of pop-cultural happening.

June 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses

In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo. They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled. But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields. There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule. The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked.

I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way. If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread. Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality – an energy in the line – that trumps modeling and space. His most poweful paintings, however, don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color. In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another. In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them. Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky. The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life.

June 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses

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.

June 25, 2012 by Nalina Moses