A building you are meant to walk on. The roof is a public square that rises out of the fjord, and it costs nothing.
The Norwegian National Opera and Ballet opened in 2008, designed by Snøhetta, and it did something almost no major cultural building does: it gave the roof away.
The whole white Carrara marble surface slopes down from the ridge into the water, and the public is invited to walk up it, sit on it, eat lunch on it and lie on it in July. There is no ticket, no barrier and no opening time.
It has become Oslo’s main public square, and it is the single best free thing in the city.
The building
The competition brief asked for a monument. Snøhetta gave a landscape instead — the idea was an iceberg calving into the fjord, and the architects have said the point was that a national institution should be something people can climb on rather than something they look up at.
The marble is Italian, chosen after a long search for stone that would stay white in Norwegian light and weather. It was cut in a pattern designed with artists so that the surface has texture and shadow rather than reading as a flat plane.
Inside, the wave wall — a curved oak screen separating the foyer from the auditorium — is the counterpoint: warm, dark and hand-finished against all that cold white outside.
The main auditorium seats about 1,370 and is a classic horseshoe in dark oak, with a chandelier of 5,800 hand-cast crystals.
She Lies
The sculpture floating in the water in front of it is Monica Bonvicini’s She Lies — a steel and glass structure on a pontoon, installed in 2010, loosely after Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice.
It rotates with the tide and the wind, so it is never in the same position twice.
Going inside
Guided tours run most days in several languages and take you backstage, into the workshops and onto the stage. Book ahead.
Tickets for opera and ballet are much cheaper than the equivalent in London, Vienna or Paris, and there is a substantial allocation of cheap seats plus a young-person’s scheme. There are also free foyer concerts and open rehearsals — check the programme.
The foyer, the café and the shop are open to anyone.
Practical
Five minutes from Oslo Central Station across the Bjørvika bridge.
The roof is open at all hours and is worth doing twice: once in daylight for the fjord and the islands, and once at dusk in winter, when the building is lit from within and the marble goes blue.
The surrounding Bjørvika district — the Munch museum, the Deichman library and the Barcode row of towers — has all been built since 2008, on what was a container port and a motorway. It is the most changed square kilometre in Scandinavia.
More Landmarks
Akershus Fortress
Seven hundred years of fortification on a headland over the fjord, never taken by an enemy, and free to walk into.
Oslo City Hall
Two brown brick towers that Oslo has never entirely forgiven, and the room where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded.
Holmenkollen
A ski jump at the end of a metro line, with the world's oldest ski museum inside the hill under it.