Two brown brick towers that Oslo has never entirely forgiven, and the room where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.
The Rådhus was begun in 1931, interrupted by the war, and opened in 1950 for Oslo’s 900th anniversary. It is two square brown brick towers, and the city has been arguing about whether it is magnificent or hideous for seventy-five years.
The answer is that it is both, and that it grows on you.
The Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in the main hall every 10 December.
This is worth understanding properly, because it confuses people. Alfred Nobel’s will specified that four prizes be awarded in Stockholm and that the peace prize be awarded by a committee elected by the Norwegian Storting, in Oslo. Norway was in union with Sweden when he wrote it and he never explained why.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee is appointed by parliament but is formally independent of it, a distinction that matters a great deal to Norway whenever a laureate causes a diplomatic incident — which is often.
The hall is otherwise in ordinary municipal use, and on any given day you may find it set out for a council meeting.
The murals
The interior is covered in enormous murals by the leading Norwegian artists of the 1930s and 40s, and they are the reason to come.
Henrik Sørensen’s Work, Administration and Celebration fills the end wall of the main hall — 13 by 24 metres, one of the largest oil paintings in Europe.
Alf Rolfsen’s frieze on the occupation, which was painted immediately after the war by an artist who had lived through it.
Per Krohg’s The City and its Environs.
Also Edvard Munch’s Life, in the east gallery.
The programme is unapologetically social democratic: labour, industry, fishing, family and the resistance. It is the visual statement of the Norway that was being built in 1950, and there is nowhere better to see what that country thought it was.
Outside
The astronomical clock on the courtyard front.
The frieze from Norse mythology in painted wood along the courtyard — sixteen scenes from the Yggdrasil myths, carved in the 1930s.
The swan fountain, and the square running down to the water where the ferries leave for the islands and the shrimp boats tie up.
The two bronze workers by the entrance, which tell you everything about who this building was for.
Practical
Free, open most days, with guided tours in summer.
It closes for events, and around 10 December it is largely inaccessible because of the prize ceremony and the security around it.
The Nobel Peace Center is across the square in the old West Station building and covers the prize itself.
More Landmarks
The Opera House
A building you are meant to walk on. The roof is a public square that rises out of the fjord, and it costs nothing.
Akershus Fortress
Seven hundred years of fortification on a headland over the fjord, never taken by an enemy, and free to walk into.
Holmenkollen
A ski jump at the end of a metro line, with the world's oldest ski museum inside the hill under it.