Neighbourhood watch: Oslo Architecture Triennale 2022

As cities around the world heave and split under shifting economies, as populations boom, as industrial districts fall from use, and as planners struggle to undo decades of development that crowned car as king, the question of how communities at every scale are formed and reformed must constantly be raised and rethought. The eighth Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) sits with this question weightily in mind with the theme ‘Mission Neighbourhood – (Re)forming communities’, bringing case studies, conversations, installations and ideas from cities across the Nordic region – and occasionally further afield – together in a constellation of sites across Oslo.

Most comprehensive in demonstrating this triennale’s thesis is the ‘Neighbourhood Lab’, set up at the old Munch Museum in Tøyen as the first public programming since the Munch collection moved to its new harbourside home in Bjørvika. Looking to push against conceptions of a trienniale as a static showcase, resistant to response from or relation with its visitors, the Lab hosts a whole programme of conversations, workshops, conferences, concerts and other events. This is in addition to its central exhibitions: a collection of drawings by Peter Cook titled Ideas for Cities, competition entries for the development of Grønlikaia – the last in a series of major transformations to Oslo’s harbour, and the titular Mission Neighbourhood – Re(forming) communities, a broad selection of projects, practices and processes that make the meat of the triennial’s propositions for urban intervention.

‘“Let’s not be afraid of capital, or be super critical,” begs curator Christian Pagh’

Presenting moderate and tangible solutions to specific local conditions and governance contexts, the Lab demonstrates an intentional shift away from the far more radical and speculative editions of OAT’s recent past, which in 2019 explored ways out of the interlocking relationship of global capital and climate death with Enough: the Architecture of Degrowth, and in 2016, the rights and spatial politics of migrations and other global flows with After Belonging. ‘Let’s not be afraid of capital, or be super critical,’ begs OAT Director and this year’s Chief Curator, Christian Pagh, hoping to bring the triennale back to ground, to build on ‘a tradition of the Nordic countries to produce a social-democratic model for balanced public-private partnerships’. Where previous editions of the Oslo Architecture Triennale have brought in external curators from outside the Nordic region, Pagh’s Danish perspective bolsters that local focus, while his joint role as director and curator empowers the triennale as an entity with greater management of its output and perception, both locally and globally.

Bringing in contributors from Bergen, Gothenburg, Aarhus, Copenhagen, Malmö, Stockholm, Helsinki, Trondheim and Reykjavik as well as Oslo, Pagh hopes to establish channels of conference between Oslo and its neighbour cities, positioning the triennial amid a ‘Nordic renaissance of collective urban solutions’. This regional recentring is clearly a sensible and fruitful framing device for selecting projects to include in such a nebulous theme, giving the triennial clarity and focus and ensuring relevance for local architects, planners, and policy makers.

Oslo finds itself in a period of massive transformation – with large-scale developments in the prominent waterfront district of Bjørvika starting with Snøhetta’s Opera House (2008) and continuing with the mixed-use residential Barcode high-rises (2016) by Vandkunsten Architects and LOF Arkitekter, the new Munch Museum and the main Deichman Library (both 2020). There are further plans to develop the fjord-facing districts beyond. Informing and responding to both its particular context and to issues of individuation and alienation in the contemporary city, Mission Neighbourhood is well positioned to inform local design and policy in traceable and tangible ways.

‘The Oslo Architecture Triennale asserts a relatively conservative, even myopic view’

At the same time, such a blinkered focus on the Nordic region operates in a promotional capacity, the local attending to the global stage to position Oslo and its neighbours always at the forefront of the urban imagination, without challenges to the course or propositions that stray too far from the status quo. Appearing to have drawn back its tendrils – in its breadth of considerations as well as geographically, as it withdraws from the far more radical assertions of previous years to strictly built or buildable urban interventions and strategies – OAT asserts a relatively conservative, even myopic view. That is, the city’s fundaments are fine: carbon, global capital and constant cycles of new construction are inevitabilities to be managed rather than rethought.

By contrast, the exhibition at the National Museum – Architecture (NMArk) demonstrates a beautiful balance between the radical and the real. Titled Coming into Community, NMArk’s response to the triennale’s neighbourhood theme picks up on Oslo’s year of queer culture (celebrating 50 years since the decriminalisation of male homosexuality in Norway) to bring together six experiments in disrupting decades of heteronormative planning in favour of new non-nuclear urbanisms.

Stonewall Nation, a separatist state for gay men proposed by Don Jackson in the wake of the Stonewall riots in 1969, asks for an urbanism entirely divorced from the systems that structure straight society, whereas the initially squatted and semi-self-built, cooperatively owned neighbourhood of Svartlamon in Trondheim suggests how ownership models might be restructured right in the centre of an existing city.

‘Mission Neighbourhood begs the question of what purpose an exhibition for the future of our cities might serve’

Noel Phyllis Birkby and Leslie Kanes Weisman’s Women’s School of Planning and Architecture, founded in 1975 as an alternative to existing design programmes, challenged pedagogical models to encourage women to imagine spaces for living and working beyond preordained patriarchal design principles, while the free architectural assistance and educational resources provided by feminist architecture co-operative Matrix in the 1980s and ’90s elaborates how spaces built with marginalised people in mind might actually be realised.

Against these historical references, an installation in the Sverre Fehn pavilion at NMArk by the Swedish art and architecture collective Mycket turns Fehn’s sober extension into a nightclub, breaking from traditional considerations of the residential neighbourhood to include spaces for those for whom the family home fails to feel like home.

Mission Neighbourhood begs the question of what purpose an exhibition for the future of our cities might serve – turning away from damning polemics, sky-high thinking or revolutionary ventures that rub against the structures that underpin global conditions and towards the intimate grit of planning policy. Coming into Community answers this question with real but radical challenges to those grand structures: challenges that operate at the scale of the local but that speak to things elsewhere, that unfold and open into multiple imaginaries of what else might be possible.