The Glacier Museum is as arresting an architectural masterpiece as the site upon which it is built. The Norwegian Glacier Museum opened in 1991, but its architectural footprint was altered and expanded in 2007.
Architect Sverre Fehn designed this unique museum to celebrate the natural phenomena of glaciers. Exhibits explain to visitors the way in which glaciers are formed and their fragility in today’s world of global warming.
Fehn designed the complex with exhibition areas, a theater, bookshop, and restaurant. In 1997 he was awarded the international Pritzker Prize for Architecture, and the Glacier Museum was noted as one of his most outstanding works.
Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, traditional Moroccan building techniques, and Japanese architectural aesthetics influenced Fehn at different points in his career. He has combined all of these influences into an original architectural language set within the framework of the wooden building culture that is his Norse heritage.
This architect creates works that seem to grow naturally from the contours of the site using the famous Nordic light as a key constituent of construction. For Fehn, the building must be an extension of the evolving landscape, always in harmony, never in competition. With the Glacier Museum he has been wholly successful.
The main entrance to the museum is a fissure-like corridor set between twin staircases that take visitors up onto a roof that doubles as a viewing platform. While the walls of the complex are built of concrete, wood has been consistently used elsewhere.
Ceiling beams, doors, windows, and interior details soften the spaces and evoke for Fehn and for visitors alike the forests of Norway. Windows and mirrors are used not only to bring in and magnify the light but also to emulate the transparent ice sheets and glittering crystals that are integral to Jostedalsbreen.
Fehn has described the complex as a representation of just another glacially deposited rock. But its long window-punctuated axis creeping glacier-like across acid-green grass defies such a simple definition.
With its serial windows punching holes of light in the curving glacial “granite” of concrete walls, the building inverts its expected weight by seeming to float above the ground. The flowing ice cap of concrete marks the 2007 addition of a 360-degree theater and breaks up the straight lines created by the shards of concrete that form the main axis of the building.
The new footprint opens a dialogue between finite human purpose and the eons-long geological evolution of mountains, glacier, and valley. There is both a spare minimalism to the complex and a richness of execution that, while pleasing the eye, fulfills Sverre Fehn’s purpose by carrying it upward to the mountains behind it.
