National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design

The single largest and most cohesive art collection in Norway - more than 400,000 objects spanning antiquity to the present, of which about 6,500 are on permanent display - built by consolidating the country's former national gallery, its decorative-arts and design museum, and its museum of contemporary art into one holding. Its deepest strength is 19th- and early-20th-century Norwegian painting (Dahl, Backer, Krohg and an extensive Munch holding anchored by The Scream), supported by a significant run of French 19th-century painting, Norway's largest architecture archive, and decorative arts running from the 12th-century Baldishol Tapestry to contemporary Scandinavian design.

The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design (Nasjonalmuseet) was formally established on 28 April 2003 by merging five existing Norwegian state institutions: the National Gallery (founded 1842), the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design (the old Art Industry Museum), the Museum of Architecture and the National Museum - Architecture. From the outset, a single new building to house all of them was the precondition of the merger, since the separate premises inherited from the old museums were judged too small and too scattered. Architecture competitions for expanding the museums at Tullinlokka in Oslo had already failed to reach a conclusion in 1972 and again in 1995.

In spring 2008 the Norwegian government settled on a new site: Vestbanen, the former Oslo West railway station beside the Aker Brygge waterfront, opposite Oslo City Hall and the Nobel Peace Center. An international design competition followed, won in November 2010 by Kleihues + Schuwerk, a partnership formed specifically for the project between the Berlin firm Kleihues + Kleihues and the Naples-based practice of architect Klaus Schuwerk, who acted as lead designer. The pre-project was completed in spring 2012, and on 22 March 2013 the government presented the scheme with an estimated cost of about 5.3 billion Norwegian kroner; the Storting (parliament) confirmed a cost ceiling of that order on 6 June 2013.

The old museums closed to the public in stages as the collections were packed for the move: the Art Industry Museum on 16 October 2016, the Museum of Contemporary Art permanently on 3 September 2017, and the historic National Gallery building on Universitetsgata on 13 January 2019, after which its rooms served only as storage. Originally targeted for 2020, the new building opened to the public on 11 June 2022, roughly three decades after the idea of a single national museum was first raised.

Schuwerk has described his design brief to himself in frankly monumental terms: a museum, he told Dezeen, is 'in a sense the temple of our time,' and he wanted to design 'my own Pantheon.' The finished building is an L-shaped block of about 54,600 square metres wrapped around a paved public courtyard that opens onto the Aker Brygge waterfront, making it the largest art museum in the Nordic countries. Its lower four storeys form a solid stone base, entirely clad in Oppdal slate cut into vertical slabs of varying width - a treatment several critics have compared to an exposed cliff face - while the rear of the block, facing away from the public plaza, holds offices, conservation labs and other back-of-house functions.

Inside the base, 86 rooms across two floors hold the permanent Collection Exhibition, arranged in a broadly chronological sequence from antiquity to the mid-20th century and beyond. White limestone floors on the ground level (a nod to the Louvre, according to the architects) give way to white oak on the floor above, and window bays throughout frame views out to the surrounding streets and internal sculpture courtyards. Capping the whole structure is the Light Hall: a free-standing volume clad in paper-thin, glass-encased marble tiles that glows from within after dark. At roughly 2,400 square metres with a ceiling height of about seven metres, it is built for large-scale temporary exhibitions and installations too big for a conventional gallery wall, and it opens onto a public roof terrace overlooking Oslo's harbour and the Akershus fortress. The total project, financed by the Norwegian state, has been reported in the international press at costs ranging from roughly 5.3 billion kroner to press estimates of 620-650 million US dollars, depending on the exchange rate and date used.

What makes the building unusual is not just its size but what it was built to reconcile: four previously separate, differently run museums, each with its own curatorial tradition, now sharing one set of walls. The former National Gallery's paintings and sculpture - the core of the 'old masters and modern art' holdings, including Edvard Munch's work - occupy most of the ground and first floors. The former Museum of Decorative Arts and Design contributes the furniture, silver, glass, ceramics, textiles and historic costume that used to hang in the St Olavs gate building. The former Museum of Contemporary Art's collection of post-1945 Norwegian and international art, previously shown in a converted 1907 bank building at Bankplassen, is now integrated into the same building and into the temporary programme of the Light Hall. Only the architecture collection - more than 300,000 drawings, models and photographs documenting Norwegian architectural history since the 1830s, including the Sverre Fehn archive - remains in its own building, the National Museum - Architecture at Bankplassen 3, a few minutes' walk away; the museum's network also includes Villa Stenersen, a 1937-39 house designed by Arne Korsmo for the collector Rolf E. Stenersen, and the Station Master's House on the museum plaza.

The result, on the evidence of the museum's own room list, is a permanent display of roughly 6,500 objects drawn from a total collection of more than 400,000, spanning the 12th-century Baldishol Tapestry to newly commissioned contemporary art. The Architect's Newspaper's review noted that the very first artwork visitors encounter on entering is Maret Anne Sara's Pile o'Sapmi Supreme, a curtain of reindeer skulls shot through the head, marking the government-owned museum's decision to open with a piece about the Norwegian state's own historical treatment of the Sami.

The single work most visitors come to see is Edvard Munch's The Scream, and the museum's own catalogue entry is precise about which version this is: a tempera-and-crayon painting on cardboard, signed and dated 1893, that scholarship now generally accepts as painted before the Munch Museum's own tempera version of the same subject, which internal dating places no earlier than 1910. (Two further pastel versions and a lithograph also exist; the pastel dated 1895 and the lithograph are outside this museum's holdings.) The National Museum's Scream was first shown in Berlin in 1893 under the title Verzweiflung (Despair), entered the old National Gallery's collection as a gift from the industrialist Olaf Schou in 1910, and was stolen from the gallery and recovered undamaged the same year, in 1994. A faint pencil inscription in the top corner - 'Can only be painted by a madman!' - was confirmed by infrared and graphological analysis carried out jointly by the National Museum and the Munch Museum in 2020 to be in Munch's own hand.

The Scream sits among a much larger run of 19th-century Norwegian painting: Johan Christian Dahl's Romantic landscapes, including the 1842 View from Stalheim; Christian Krohg's 1887 realist painting Albertine to See the Police Surgeon, whose subject - and the banned novel behind it - triggered one of the country's earliest freedom-of-expression court cases; and Harriet Backer's light-filled interiors, among them Blue Interior of 1883. The museum's international holdings from the same period include a small Van Gogh self-portrait of 1889, acquired in the same 1910 wave of purchases as The Scream. Further back in time, the Paus Collection - Roman imperial portrait busts assembled in Rome by the collector Christopher Paus and given to the old National Gallery from 1918 - is described by the museum's own historians as one of the largest collections of classical antiquities in Northern Europe. The decorative arts galleries add the Baldishol Tapestry, a fragment of Romanesque weaving found in 1879 under the floor of a demolished parish church and dated by carbon analysis to between 1040 and 1190, alongside Norwegian silver, glass and a royal costume collection.

By most measures the new building has been a public success. The Art Newspaper recorded 1.2 million visitors in 2023, the museum's first full calendar year in the new premises, enough to make it, in the paper's words, the most popular art museum in Scandinavia that year; the same publication reported attendance falling back by about 24 per cent from that opening-year peak in 2024, a pattern common to newly opened flagship museums once initial curiosity subsides. On Tripadvisor the museum holds a 4.4-out-of-5 rating from more than 3,500 reviews, with visitors most often praising the range of the collection, the scale of the galleries and the museum's practical facilities, and most often flagging strict or inconsistent bag-check security and the cost of a ticket.

The architecture has had a rougher critical reception than the collection inside it. Norwegian commentators nicknamed the slate-clad exterior the 'national prison' well before opening, a description that stuck in the country's press. The Architect's Newspaper's review, published shortly after the June 2022 opening, called the design 'surprisingly unassuming' and 'staid' when set against Oslo's more provocative recent cultural buildings - notably the crooked, perforated-metal MUNCH tower a short walk away - and found practical faults as well: an L-shaped floor plan that makes the route between period rooms 'somewhat nonlinear,' English wall text with typos, and a Light Hall whose diffusing glass-and-marble facade leaves the room dim even on a sunny day. The same review, though, praised smaller touches - sunken rooftop display rooms, 32 interactive 'activity benches' throughout the building - and singled out the museum's candour in confronting the Norwegian state's own history with the Sami as a strength rather than a weakness of the new building.

The museum stands on Brynjulf Bulls plass, a short walk from Nationaltheatret station (served by every metro line, the mainline railway and trams 11 and 13) and from the Aker Brygge tram stop (line 12). It opens Tuesday and Wednesday from 10:00 to 20:00 and Thursday to Sunday from 10:00 to 17:00, and is closed on Mondays and over the Christmas and New Year holidays. An adult ticket costs 220 NOK, a discounted ticket for under-25s costs 100 NOK, students under 30 pay 120 NOK at the counter on production of a student card, and everyone under 18 is admitted free; National Museum members enter without a ticket at all.

The building was designed to current universal-access standards throughout its public areas, with step-free routes and lifts to every floor, loanable wheelchairs, an induction loop at information points and a free multilingual Visitor Guide app that doubles as an audio guide. Bags larger than A4 size, umbrellas and similar items go into lockers on the basement level; food and drink are confined to the cafe, the second-floor lounge and the roof terrace rather than the galleries themselves. Beyond the main building, the National Museum - Architecture at Bankplassen and Villa Stenersen keep separate opening hours and are worth checking individually before a visit, since neither runs on the same schedule as the Vestbanen building described here.

The museum's collection and scale are widely admired - it opened as the largest art museum in the Nordic countries and became, by its own first full year, the most-visited art museum in Scandinavia - while the building's severe, minimalist exterior has been persistently criticised by architecture writers as monotonous and closed-off, even as most visitors judge the inside worth the trip.