Norway prides itself on its ubiquitous and egalitarian middle class, making of its opera house a celebration of folkstheatre –and it’s no empty boast– Oslo newspapers address eight pages to culture versus one to sport. But I think the architects behind the glacier-slopped Oslo Opera House have struck with typical condescending Nordic sarcasm. Here is an in-edifice to high art on which the people can trod, on every last angle. Even if Scandinavian farmers are not inclined to attend opera performances, they can sight-see from the pretentious exterior. Idealists can assert this art reaches the Hoi Poloi, as it compels visitors to put it all underfoot. It’s form over substance, literally. The result presents aimless booted peasants looking like they wouldn’t know art if they stepped on it.
I can see the pretension to flatten the Sidney Opera House, crossed with Hong Kong harbor’s wreck of the Queen Mary II. The straight lines may have impressed on paper, but crawling over with masses, I see more a sinking white elephant.
Wonder what the acoustics are like. Squared off chamber, emmm… isn’t musical architecture supposed to be music first, then visual aesthetics?
I mean, that’s why the Bass Performing Arts Center in Ft Worth gets away with being butt-ugly. Same with the Sydney Opera House. Because the sound is Awesome in every sense of the word. Maybe I should look at the interior layout before getting out of bounds.
The wiki page has some descriptions of it that say it’s skateboard friendly. O… K..
With one picture of the interior walls. Or part of them. And a bunch of links which point to sites written in Norse, which I neither speak nor read.