Architecture

Architect Knut Østby:

– After having worked on the “Seilduksfabrikken” (Sail cloth factory) for many years, and been a so-called maternity helper placing the Oslo National Academy of the Arts into this fantastic old building, it is not only interesting and exiting but also a true honor to finish the modernisation.
Visions for the gallery have grown since the autumn of 2009 when the first sketches were drawn. What in my mind was a rough room with exposed constructions of old and solid wood all the way up with a surrounding mezzanine of glass railings, have become white closed boxes without upper lighting, even without contact to each other.
The current vision is that the Oslo National Academy of the Arts gets the required spaces and that the room on the ground level gets to be a place where the school meets the city, and where the public can see the students’ work.

Architects never work in a vacuum. Every project is a very complex product where the function of the architect is to stich all the elements together based on the function – in this case a gallery for the Oslo National Academy of The Arts. With the Museum of Contemporary Art in mind I can see that the gallery space is meant to be dimmed and neutral, preventing the art fighting with the room.
The challenges have been piling up due to strict laws of protection and a strict protection officer. It must have been difficult to see the wonderful wood constructions being covered up by plasterboards.
The modernization also includes new technical facilities with a sophisticated infrastructure consisting of ventilation, central heating, automatic fire extinguishers and a new transformer.

It is not an easy task to fit all this into a building that used to be an old warehouse for the textile industry, a building without isolation. At the same time we have to save the conservation value. Never the less, use is the best friend.
It takes time to build a house but twice as much time to rebuild something old. When the first exhibition opens in May 21th there will be a lot of temporary solutions, even without a complete set of technical facilities.
Sometime in the late autumn of 2011 the fully finished gallery at the Oslo National Academy of The Arts will be opened.

The following drawings show how the new gallery is meant to be: