The flying Norsemen.

An airport planned with great clarity and attention to human factors was required by the Norwegian government to be an advertisement for the country. The architects have ingeniously avoided kitsch in pursuit of ethos.

Since flying began, Oslo airport was at Fornebu, not far from the city centre on the west side of the Fjord. It was in many ways very convenient, and even into the '80s, it offered visitors a strong flavour of Norway as they struggled from planes to terminal across the tarmac, inhaling a heady mixture of scents of pines and the sea, all heavily flavoured with kerosene. The big, rounded, forest-covered hills of southern Norway were just beyond the surrounding suburbs. Of late, the place has been updated, and become very similar to hundreds of other examples of the type all over the world. But the site was constricted, precluding expansion (the great necessity of all modern airports); local suburbanites objected to the noise and pollution (why do people who buy houses near an airport always go on like this?). And developers could see huge opportunities in a large, essentially empty site so close to the centre, yet on the sea.

So in the early '90s, the Norwegian government took the decision to build a new airport to the north of the city at Gardermoen, a moor in the gently rolling forested landscape of Akershus county. Extraordinarily, Parliament required that the building should in some way evoke Norway, just as old Fornebu used to (though of course in a different way). The designers were required to make the place both a high-tech airport, and an example of Norwegian byggeskikk, which some have translated as 'Norwegian vernacular'(1) - but it is obviously absurd to suppose that a modern airport could be created out of logs, and a better interpretation might be 'Norwegian practice', or perhaps 'custom'. Norwegian politicians are more sophisticated than most when it comes to making the environment, and have rules that all public buildings should be examples of good quality in architecture.(2)

A company, OSL, was set up to act as client, and it was required to install systems to ensure that both quality and atmospheric requirements could be met. Surveys of lay opinion resulted in broad guidelines about Norwegian-ness today: 'Prudence, closeness to nature, an open and egalitarian society and good usage of local resources'(3) were held to be characteristics which applied as much to modern as traditional architecture. OSL produced a handbook to which all designers were required to conform.(4) This sounds unbearably bureaucratic and rigid, but in fact the policy has produced a crop of varied and well designed buildings by different architects, including a hotel, the plant centre (district heating, reserve power station and so on), a railway station (for the new line that runs up from the main station in the city), a customs headquarters and of course the control tower and terminal building by Aviaplan, a consortium specially forged for Norway's biggest ever building project by four local firms and a Danish one.

The terminal and tower were defined in the handbook as the most important elements in the complex, which is laid out between two parallel runways orientated north to south. The terminal looks north over an apparently almost untouched landscape covered in birch and pine, while to the south are grouped the ancillary buildings, roads and railway in a landscape which has been divided into large open-air rooms by belts of deciduous trees, birch again, but with broader leaved ones like maple as well. Overall planning is very simple: more buildings can be added north and south as need demands. Wings extend east and west from the terminal forming the first pier of the airport (a pier is where the planes pull up, and passengers get on and off). A further pier is planned to the north parallel to this first one, and there is provision for a third north of that. These future buildings will be linked to the terminal by a tunnel under the apron and taxiways, made wide enough to accommodate some kind of mechanical transport.

The central terminal is extremely simple in concept: a big hall with a roof that swoops upwards towards a great window-wall to the north. Arrivals are at ground level in the hall with departures on an upper level that floats above. You turn up by car or bus at first floor level and go straight across bridges through the glass wall (much lower on this side to reduce insolation). On reaching the departures area, ticketing offices and check-in desks are encountered, but the main sensation is being drawn forward towards the planes and landscape. Aviaplan has succeeded in creating the dramatic visual link between arrival and planes that Foster wanted to make at Stansted:(5) a strategy that was in the end defeated in the English airport by the demands of customs and security organizations. By separating arrivals and departures vertically, some of the problems encountered at Stansted have been avoided. Once past security arrangements, passengers turn left for inland journies and right (east) to passport control for international flights. The long wings are of course fitted with travelators which whirl you to your gate, with its waiting area fitted out in specially designed seating of leather, steel and wood.

Arriving passengers come in from the air-bridges at a higher level and are conveyed on 4m wide galleries towards the big terminal shed in the middle of the plan. Galleries are connected by bridges, which visually divide the 18m wide central void into distinct episodes, and further spatial division of the long space inside the piers is provided by services shafts set 36m apart down the length of the wing. From the galleries, arriving people are led by escalator or lift down past departure level to ground level, where they encounter passport controls and baggage carousels, and then progress to the buses and taxis waiting outside (or to the escalators down to the station).(6)

As the rules laid down that Norwegian materials should be used, the roof structure is of wood (a decision that was not popular with all the architects, some of whom thought that it was naively folklorish compared to the steel structure they first suggested when they started work in 1990). In fact, the result is elegant. Paired curving beams are supported by cast steel capitals on top of big round concrete columns, set at 18m centres and positioned in threes to allow the double curve to be divided into two spans. (Such concrete construction is regarded as a Norwegian speciality since it was extensively used to support North Sea oil platforms). The swooping beams have top and bottom booms of laminated timber connected by paired plywood webs. Only the bottom booms can be seen clearly, and they are carefully shaped with the human roundness of bats or hockey sticks. Between the pairs of beams is white perforated metal, which acts as a diffuser for the luminance of strips of rooflights. Through the metal veil can be dimly seen the upper parts of the main beams and the timber lattice secondary structures which connect them. At night, the perforated metal acts as a reflector for uplighters, throwing luminance down onto the light wood and veined grey marble floor of the departures level, or further down to the dark Norwegian slate of the arrivals hall.

Wood is everywhere in the interior, forming the check-in desks, the waiting area floors, bar panelling, the ceiling of the arrivals hall and the elegant horizontal screens round the stubby glass office towers that pop up at departure level in the big space. It could all be very kitsch, but the rigorous self-discipline of the large team of architects has ensured that, by and large, everything is done with grace and dignity. And for all the specified Norwegian-ness, as Christian Norberg-Schulz has remarked, 'there is no aim to invoke a nationalistic adaptation of a cosy tradition, but ... to show that we have arrived at this place, a truthful expression of time'.(7) It is to be hoped that the handbook of visual rules will remain in force to suppress the horrible proliferation of commercial signs and other muck which messes up practically every airport in the world (and has, for instance, practically wrecked Stansted visually). If that could be achieved, arrival at Gardermoen will continue to be a remarkable, particular and calming experience that speaks of a civilized society. For all its initial problems (for instance the roads were not properly finished when the place opened) Oslo's new airport looks as if it may continue to be that real rarity in air travel: a place.

1 See for instance Byggekunst, 1 1999, p16.

2 See AR August 1993. In fact, the policy does not always translate properly into practice because competitive tendering on price grounds plays a major part in building procurement.

3 Byggekunst op cit p18.

4 See Byggekunst 1 1995.

5 See AR May 1991.

6 Luggage is taken on conveyers from check-in gates down to central sorting hall below ground level. It is then taken at 40km/h by electrically driven automatic carts under the piers to the gate nearest the relevant plane. The system is broadly similar in reverse, with baggage delivered to carousels at arrivals level in the hall.

7 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 'Storrommets Arkitektur', Byggekunst 1 1999, p48 (author's translation).

Architect Aviaplan, Oslo

Project leader Gudmund Stokke

Concept group Niels Torp, Hans Haagensen, Ole Wiig

Project team Ole Torklep, John Arne Bjerknes, Geoffrey Clark, Bernhard Dahle/Torben S. Jensen, Per Suul, Pal Laurantzon, Christian Henriksen, Jan Ellef Soyland, Ninni Goranson, Roald Sand, Ake Letting

Structural engineer Chris Wise, Ore Arup & Partners

Lighting Andre Tammes, Lighting Design Partnership

Mechanical engineer Reinertsengruppen

IT systems IGP 

Photographs Terje Agnalt 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17 Damian Heimisch 5 Guy Fehn 2, 3, 9, 10, 13, 15