Built quietly

The submissive building

For most of the twentieth century, hotel architecture in spectacular places was loud. The big Norwegian fjord hotels of around 1900 - gabled, carved, several stories high, often on their own promontory at the head of a long narrow inlet - announced themselves across the water, and the announcement was the point. The hotel was the protagonist of the view. The fjord was its supporting cast. Union Øye, which arrived by ship up the Hjørundfjord as a prefabricated building in 1891, was built for the late-nineteenth-century wave of tourism, when visitors came by steamer and liked their hotels to feel solidly, recognizably hotelish.

A century on, the best Norwegian designers have decided to do the opposite. Their buildings sit low. They use local timber and local stone. They take the trouble to align with the prevailing wind and the angle of the late-summer sun. They treat the view as the protagonist and themselves as the frame. The most ambitious of them - the underwater restaurant Under at Lindesnes, the cantilevered cabins at Manshausen, the cluster of pentagonal huts at Tungestølen - try, as far as is reasonable, to disappear.

This is not a lack of ambition. It is a particular kind of confidence: the confidence of a designer who knows that no human structure, however well-engineered or expensively built, can compete with the raw drama of a 1,200-meter fjord wall, and who has stopped trying. The architecture becomes a way of focusing the visitor's attention outward rather than inward. The interior is restrained because the exterior cannot be improved upon.

This shift - from declarative architecture to submissive architecture - is the thread that ties together the buildings below, whichever firm drew them.

The firms behind the movement

If a single project has done most of the work in establishing this movement internationally, it is Snøhetta's Under at Lindesnes, completed in 2019. Snøhetta calls it Europe's first underwater restaurant: a 34-meter concrete form that breaks the surface of the water and rests on the seabed five meters below, with a large window onto the seabed and a dining room for 35 to 40 guests. The rough concrete shell is meant to become an artificial reef, and cameras on the facade let marine researchers follow the fish and the life around the building.

Snøhetta itself - founded in Oslo in 1989 - is the most internationally recognized Norwegian architecture firm of the past three decades. Their portfolio outside the country includes the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt (completed 2001), the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion in New York (2014), the redesign of Times Square (2017) and the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran (2016). Within Norway they are responsible for the Oslo Opera House (2008, winner of the EU Mies van der Rohe Award), the Tungestølen mountain cabins (2019) and the Powerhouse Brattørkaia office building in Trondheim (2019), which the firm calls the world's northernmost energy-positive building. The point of listing this is not to flatter the firm but to register that the architectural ambition behind the smaller Norwegian lodges is real and is connected to a much larger international practice.

Other Norwegian firms in the same conversation: Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter, whose Trollstigen visitor center and viewing platforms (completed 2012) are among the best-known stops on the National Tourist Routes; Jensen & Skodvin, who designed Juvet Landscape Hotel (2008); Helen & Hard, the Stavanger-based firm behind the Vindmøllebakken co-housing project in prefabricated timber (2019); and Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen, who drew the Stegastein platform further down this list.

What unites these firms, as we read their work, is a consistent design ethic that is unusual in the global architectural mainstream. They tend to design for the place rather than for the portfolio. They tend to use local material, often local timber, almost always above the requirements of any given budget. They tend to subordinate the building to the landscape. Whether this constitutes a coherent national school or simply a set of overlapping personal preferences is a question that academic architectural criticism has not entirely settled. From the visitor's point of view, the consistency is what matters: the lodges feel like they belong to one another.

Eight buildings worth knowing about

What follows is not a comprehensive list. It is a list of the eight Norwegian buildings - six lodges, one restaurant, one bridge-gallery - that we believe a visitor with any interest in modern architecture should know exist. The lodges can be booked as stays; the others can be visited independently or as a stop on a wider journey.

• Juvet Landscape Hotel - Valldal, Sunnmøre

  Designed by Jensen & Skodvin and built in 2007-2008. The first phase is seven detached rooms, each a small house of solid wood standing on steel rods drilled into the rock, scattered through the forest by the Gudbrandsjuvet gorge in Valldal, so that no blasting was needed. Each room has one or two walls of full-height glass, turned so that every room gets its own view. Bird rooms and a writer's cottage have been added since. Alex Garland shot Ex Machina (2014) here, but Juvet is a working hotel that predates the film. It deserves better than its film credit: it showed early that a remote architectural lodge could be both critically respected and a working business, and several projects on this list owe something to it.

• Manshausen - Steigen archipelago, Nordland

  Sea cabins cantilevered from an old stone quay on a small island in the Steigen archipelago, an hour and a half by express boat from Bodø to Nordskot and then a short crossing in the property's own boat. Designed by Snorre Stinessen for the Norwegian polar explorer Børge Ousland, who owns the island and opened it to guests in June 2015; a resident host couple now looks after the guests. The cabins are fronted with walls of glass, and their exact positions were set after studying wave heights, extreme weather and future sea-level rise. The old farmhouse on the island is now the restaurant and library.

• Tungestølen - Veitastrond, inner Sogn

  A cluster of nine pentagonal cabins designed by Snøhetta and completed in 2019 for Luster Turlag, the local branch of the Norwegian Trekking Association, after the cyclone Dagmar destroyed the old cabin on Christmas Day 2011. The shape is not a stylistic flourish: the outward-facing walls are given a beak-like form to slow the strong winds sweeping up from the valley floor. The site looks toward the Jostedalsbreen glacier and sleeps about 40. A toll road leads up from Veitastrond, and from the parking by the river it is about 300 meters on a good path.

• The Twist - Kistefos, Jevnaker

  Not a hotel, but the building that has probably done most to put modern Norwegian design on the international map for an architecture-curious general audience. A twisted, aluminum-clad gallery designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), opened in September 2019, that doubles as a bridge over the Randselva river at the Kistefos Museum. The building rotates ninety degrees through its length, so that one end stands as a horizontal volume and the other as a vertical one, which reconciles the different heights of the two river banks. The Kistefos sculpture park around it - Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Fernando Botero, Claes Oldenburg and others - is a serious half-day stop in its own right.

• Under - Lindesnes, southern coast

  Europe's first underwater restaurant in Snøhetta's own words, completed in 2019. Half-restaurant, half-marine research station. The dining room sits about five meters below the surface, with a large window onto the seabed. The kitchen, led by Bernt Sætre, cooks a tasting menu of ten to twelve courses from what the sea off Lindesnes brings in, and the restaurant holds one Michelin star. Reservations open about half a year ahead. The architecture and the cooking are equally serious; this is not a building where the food is the afterthought.

• Skårungen - Kabelvåg, Lofoten

  A small seaside hotel in Kabelvåg, about halfway between Svolvær and Henningsvær, with modern hotel rooms, fishermen's cabins and newer cottages, and a sauna with floor-to-ceiling windows onto the fjord next to a hot tub on the water. Less internationally famous than Juvet or Manshausen, and that is part of its appeal. For our money, one of the more considered places to stay in Lofoten, and a good choice for travelers who would rather not be in central Reine in July.

• Norwegian Wild Reindeer Center - Hjerkinn

  A small public viewing pavilion in the Dovrefjell mountains near Hjerkinn, known on site today as viewpoint Snøhetta, which the architects Snøhetta completed in 2011 for the Norwegian Wild Reindeer Foundation. Hjerkinn is one of the overnight stops on our Dovrefjell pilgrim walk. Its heart is a sculpted wooden core, milled by a large CNC machine from digital 3D models and then assembled with traditional log-building techniques, behind a glass facade that frames the plateau where the wild reindeer move. Open to the public in summer, and reached by a 1.5-kilometer gravel trail up the hill. One of Snøhetta's purest pieces of work.

• Stegastein - Aurland

  A viewing platform that reaches thirty meters out over the pine trees, 650 meters above the Aurlandsfjord, designed by Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen and built in 2006. One of the best-known structures of the National Tourist Routes (a state program of architecture along eighteen scenic roads). Free, open year-round even though the mountain road beyond it closes in winter, and it takes about ten minutes if you only want the view.

Why so much wood

Almost everything new and serious in Norwegian architecture is built in cross-laminated timber (CLT) or glulam (glued-laminated timber). The technical reasons are straightforward. CLT and glulam can span longer distances than traditional sawn timber, can be engineered to specific structural loads with predictable behavior, and can be prefabricated off-site to a precision that makes installation in remote locations practical. They also store carbon: dry wood is roughly half carbon by weight, and that carbon stays in the building for as long as the timber does.

Norway has favorable conditions for the material. The country has a very large standing softwood forest (spruce and pine, mostly), a long and well-developed forestry industry and an engineering tradition that goes back to the medieval stave churches. Mjøstårnet in Brumunddal (85.4 meters, completed 2019) was the world's tallest timber building until Ascent in Milwaukee passed it in 2022.

The other reason - the reason that travelers, rather than engineers, tend to register first - is sensory. A new timber building smells like a forest for the first year of its life. The smell of resin in the laminated beams is faint but unmistakable. A 2017 review of peer-reviewed studies in the Journal of Wood Science found that smelling, seeing or touching wood tended to produce physiological relaxation in the test subjects, from calmer brain activity to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress-hormone levels. The Norwegian architects who design with timber are not, as far as we can tell, primarily motivated by this research - they were doing it before most of it existed - but it has given the practice a useful evidence base.

There is a third reason, which is harder to articulate but easy to feel: a timber building ages well. The exterior weathers from honey-yellow to silver-gray to a deep cigar-brown over fifteen or twenty years, and the interior darkens and softens. A well-detailed timber lodge looks better at twenty than it did at five. A poorly-detailed steel-and-glass building rarely does. This is one of the small reasons the older buildings on the list above (Juvet, Stegastein) have aged into something better than they were when they opened.

A note on Snøhetta as a case study

It is worth spending a few paragraphs on Snøhetta specifically, because the firm's work is the easiest single entry point into the wider movement and because their projects are increasingly likely to be the part of a Norwegian trip a serious traveler actually visits. The firm was founded in Oslo in 1989 by the Norwegian architect Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, the American Craig Dykers and Christoph Kapeller. The breakthrough came almost at once: that same year the young practice won the competition for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, completed in 2001, and the firm has been on an international trajectory since.

What is unusual about Snøhetta is that the firm has resisted the standard star-architect career arc. They do not have a recognizable signature shape. The Oslo Opera House is a low marble slab; Under is a half-sunken concrete form; the Tungestølen cabins are timber pentagons. The firm's work is consistent in ethic - landscape-first, materials-honest, programmatically intelligent - without being consistent in form. This has made it harder to caricature than, say, a Zaha Hadid or a Frank Gehry, and easier to live with at scale.

The Norwegian projects are mostly the smaller ones. Tungestølen, Under, the Wild Reindeer Pavilion and the Powerhouse Brattørkaia office in Trondheim are projects you can actually see on a Norway trip. A serious architecture-led journey through the country can credibly include three or four Snøhetta projects in a single fortnight.

How to actually visit these places

Most of the lodges on this list are remote on purpose, and several of them sit at the head of one of the narrower fjord arms we have written about in a separate piece. Manshausen is reached by the daily express boat from Bodø to Nordskot, an hour and a half, or by a drive of just over three hours; the property picks you up by boat at Nordskot. Tungestølen is reached by a toll road up from Veitastrond at the head of Veitastrondvatnet lake, then about 300 meters on foot from the parking by the river. Under sits at Båly in Lindesnes, near the southern tip of mainland Norway, about 85 km and an hour and twenty minutes by car or taxi from Kristiansand airport. Juvet is in Valldal, between Ålesund and Åndalsnes - the same fjord-and-mountain corridor we cycle on our Ålesund to Åndalsnes cycling tour. The Wild Reindeer Pavilion near Hjerkinn requires a regional drive into Dovrefjell.

These transfers are part of the experience. The good operators understand this and treat the journey to the door as a deliberate decompression - a long boat crossing, a slow drive through changing landscape, a walk up through birch forest with the lodge revealing itself as you climb. The less good operators treat the transfer as friction to be minimized. A trip to Manshausen that begins with a hurried dash from the airport is not the same trip as one that begins with a slow morning in Bodø and an afternoon on the express boat up the coast.

A second practical point: most of these properties are small. Tungestølen has nine cabins and about 40 beds. Juvet's first phase was seven rooms. Under's dining room seats 35 to 40. Skårungen mixes hotel rooms, cabins and cottages and is, accordingly, a little more flexible, but the best rooms are similarly limited. The cumulative effect is that an architecture-led journey through Norway has to be planned considerably further ahead than a more conventional trip. We typically open conversations with travelers a season in advance for the more demanded properties. For Under, book as soon as reservations open for your month, about half a year ahead.

A third practical point: the prices for the named properties are at the upper end of the Norwegian market. Under serves a set menu at dinner, and a shorter one at lunch from April to September, with pairings on top, and the current rates for the places to stay are on each property's own site. None of this is unreasonable for what is delivered, but it is useful to know up front when shaping a budget.

The wider biophilic movement

The Norwegian projects sit inside a wider international architectural movement that is variously described as biophilic design, regenerative architecture, or simply Nordic design - none of the labels is entirely satisfactory and the boundaries are fuzzy. The shared idea is that the building should not be in adversarial relationship with the landscape it sits in: it should source materials locally where possible, it should be designed to be visually unobtrusive, it should bring natural light and natural materials into the interior, and it should produce, or at least not reduce, the surrounding ecological capacity over its lifespan.

Norway has been an unusually fertile ground for this movement for a combination of reasons. The country has the standing forest. It has the climate policy. It has, since 1994, a state program - the National Tourist Routes (Nasjonale turistveger) - that had completed 186 rest areas, viewpoints and art installations along eighteen designated scenic roads by 2025, with 215 planned by 2029, most of them by Norwegian architects working on modest budgets and tight constraints. The Trollstigen visitor center, the Stegastein platform, the Eggum rest area in Lofoten, the Allmannajuvet zinc mine museum by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor - these are individually interesting buildings and, in our view, collectively a coherent architectural project that few other countries have attempted at the same level.

A possible itinerary

If we were laying out an architecture-led Norway journey for a serious traveler - say, an architect, a designer, or a generally design-curious visitor - we would suggest a fortnight that begins in Oslo with two nights at the Sommerro hotel (opened in 2022 in the 1930s headquarters of the city's electricity company, Oslo Lysverker, which is not on the list above but is the right city anchor for an architectural trip), continues to Kistefos for the Twist and the Eliasson sculptures, drives north and west through Valdres into Sogn for two nights at Tungestølen, descends to the Hardangerfjord for the Salmon Eye pavilion, crosses to Sunnmøre for two nights at Juvet and a day in Ålesund (the country's most coherent art-nouveau town), flies north to Bodø for three nights at Manshausen, and finishes in Tromsø with a visit to Polaria (the Arctic aquarium and experience center, designed by JAF Arkitektkontor and opened in 1998, its roofs laid like ice floes pushed against the shore).

The sequence follows the country's design-historical arc - early-twentieth-century Norwegian art nouveau in Ålesund, interwar functionalism in Oslo, viewing platforms along the National Tourist Routes, twenty-first-century timber lodges in the mountains and on the coast. Read in this order, the journey becomes a working education in how Norwegian design has evolved.

It is also a serious investment of time. Most travelers will not have a fortnight to give to architecture as a single subject; the journey can be compressed to ten days or split into two separate week-long trips. Travelers who want the architecture stitched into a longer active week often add it onto a walking week through the four serious Norwegian ranges in Sunnmøre or the inner Sogn, or onto a food-led week shaped by the new Norwegian kitchen. We are happy to work either format.