National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

The National Museum's core strength is breadth under a single roof: Norway's principal collection of historical and modern painting and sculpture, its largest collection of works on paper, its national design and crafts collection, and its national architecture archive, all previously split across four separate buildings and now shown together for the first time. The Munch holdings, 58 paintings and 175 works on paper including the museum's own 1893 Scream, sit inside a wider collection whose depth in some areas - Norwegian applied arts from the 18th century in particular - is matched by comparatively thin holdings in others, a direct legacy of how differently each of the four predecessor museums collected before 2003.

The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design was created on 28 April 2003 by merging four existing Norwegian state museums into a single institution: the National Gallery (the country's main painting collection since 1842), the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (founded 1876, one of Europe's earliest museums of its kind), the Museum of Contemporary Art (opened 1990 in a former bank building), and the Museum of Architecture (founded 1975). Each had outgrown its own building by the early 2000s, and the merger was driven as much by that shared shortage of space as by any curatorial ambition to show the four collections together.

For nearly two decades after the merger the National Museum still operated out of its four separate historic buildings around central Oslo, closing them one by one as the new building at Vestbanen took shape: the Decorative Arts museum in October 2016, the Museum of Contemporary Art in September 2017, and the old National Gallery building in January 2019.

The government chose the Vestbanen site, the former West Station grounds by the Aker Brygge waterfront, in spring 2008. An international design competition followed, won in November 2010 by the German firm Kleihues + Schuwerk with a scheme the architects called Forum Artis. The Norwegian parliament approved a construction budget of 5.327 billion kroner in June 2013, and building work began not long after.

The building opened to the public on 11 June 2022, roughly fourteen years after the site was chosen and a little under two decades after the 2003 merger that created the institution it now houses. At 588,000 square feet, with about 140,000 square feet of that given over to galleries, it is now described as the largest art museum in the Nordic countries.

Klaus Schuwerk, the building's co-architect, has said the design was conceived specifically to avoid the showy, single-gesture approach of museums such as the Guggenheim's branch buildings, so the new museum would not overshadow Oslo's own cityscape; he has spoken of designing it to last two centuries rather than to make a singular architectural statement. The result is a low, L-shaped complex clad largely in vertically cut slate that reads, from the ground, as closer to an exposed cliff face than a landmark building.

That restraint has not settled the argument over whether it works. Reviewing the building for The Architect's Newspaper shortly after it opened, critic Jonathan Hilburg judged it surprisingly unassuming, a quality he suggested might be the key to the design's longevity, while also flagging a genuinely awkward side effect: the L-shaped floor plan gives the chronological galleries a nonlinear flow, so a visitor can drift from a room of royal court dresses into 1960s industrial design without quite meaning to. Norwegian commentary has been less measured, with the grey stone exterior mocked in the local press as resembling a prison.

The collection display is organised in two main parts. The ground floor covers design from antiquity to the present and crafts from 1970 onward, arranged as a sequence of similarly sized rooms with smaller side cabinets, a layout the museum's own planning materials describe as familiar from 19th-century museum buildings. The second floor is split into three sections: an enfilade of rooms for painting and sculpture up to 1900, a more loosely organised wing for early 20th-century modern art, and a sequence of larger rooms at the western end for contemporary work. Two further rooms are set aside for architecture.

The museum's own account of the display explains why the two floors are treated so differently: the collection itself arrived from four separate predecessor museums with uneven collecting histories, so 18th-century design holdings are unusually deep while painting from the same period is comparatively thin, and the architecture collection barely predates the 19th century at all. Rather than smooth that unevenness out, the room-by-room organisation is built around it.

The building's signature space is the Light Hall on the roof, a 426-foot, glass-and-marble gallery with no walls to hang paintings from; everything shown there has to be suspended from the ceiling or anchored to the floor instead, and one section is specially equipped for artists who work with water. It is used for large temporary installations and travelling exhibitions that the museum's older, smaller buildings could never have accommodated.

The Munch Room, on the second floor, has a more contested history. A 2005 rehang of the old National Gallery, promoted under the title Everyone is Talking About the Museum, deliberately split Munch's paintings among works by his contemporaries and abandoned chronological display altogether; the change proved unpopular enough that a 2011 rehang reinstated both a dedicated, chronologically arranged Munch Room and the broader chronological principle across the rest of the galleries. That reinstated approach, rather than the 2005 experiment, is what continues into the room bearing his name in the new building today.

Behind the building debate is a collection that, taken as a whole, is the largest of its kind in Norway: more than 400,000 objects in total, of which roughly 6,500 are on display at any one time. The pre-1945 holdings alone run to about 4,500 paintings and 900 sculptures, plus some 50,000 works on paper from the Middle Ages to the present, alongside the design, craft and architecture collections that came in through the 2003 merger. Very little of that range could be shown at once in the four older buildings; the new galleries were sized specifically to change that.

What a visitor actually gets from a single ticket is the range itself: Norwegian Romantic landscape painting next to Munch, next to a 12th-century tapestry, next to 1960s Norwegian furniture design, next to a working architecture archive, under one roof for the first time in the institution's history.

Visitors consistently describe the National Museum as far larger and more comprehensively laid out than the four separate museums it replaced, praising how easily the collection can be explored in one visit and how bright the top-floor galleries feel, while architecture critics and a good number of visitors have been notably cooler about the reserved, slate-clad building itself and its strict entry checks.