A shipyard turned into a boardwalk, a Renzo Piano gallery, and a city beach — plus the towers people argue about.
Aker mekaniske verksted was one of Norway’s great shipyards, on the waterfront in the middle of Oslo. It closed in 1982, and what replaced it was the first of the developments that have rebuilt the whole of Oslo’s harbour front.
Aker Brygge
Opened in stages from 1986, keeping some of the yard buildings and adding a great deal of glass.
It is a boardwalk with restaurants, offices, apartments and a shopping arcade, and it is where the ferries to the islands and to Nesodden leave from.
On a summer evening it is packed, and the view down the fjord with the ferries crossing is genuinely lovely.
The restaurants are the most expensive in a very expensive city, the terraces have outdoor heaters running most of the year, and the food is generally fine rather than good. That is the honest position.
Tjuvholmen
The next spit along — thieves’ islet, so called because it was where executions took place in the eighteenth century — redeveloped from 2005 as a much denser and much better piece of architecture.
The Astrup Fearnley Museum, by Renzo Piano, opened 2012. A curved glass roof over three pavilions, split by a canal, right at the water. The collection is contemporary and international — Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles is here, along with Hirst, Cattelan, Sherman, Gursky and a substantial Norwegian holding. The building is better than the collection and the building is very good.
The sculpture park beside it, free and open, with Louise Bourgeois, Anish Kapoor, Ugo Rondinone and Franz West among others.
The city beach at the end — a small sandy beach with a diving platform, on the fjord, in the middle of the capital, and free. Oslo swims in it from May onwards and the water is clean.
The bigger picture
Fjordbyen — the fjord city — is the forty-year project of taking Oslo’s waterfront back from the port and the motorway.
Aker Brygge was the first phase. Then Tjuvholmen, then Bjørvika on the eastern side with the Opera House, MUNCH, the Deichman library and the Barcode row.
The Barcode — twelve narrow towers of different heights in a line — is the most argued-about architecture in Norway. Critics say it walls the city off from the fjord; supporters point out that what it replaced was a container terminal and a motorway.
The motorway itself went into the Operatunnelen under the harbour, which is what made all of it possible.
Practical
Free to walk. The gallery charges.
Ten minutes from the City Hall, and the National Museum is between them.
The fjord ferries from Aker Brygge run on ordinary Ruter transport tickets, which is the single best-value thing in Oslo.
