The future Munch Museum is not only a facility to safeguard and exhibit a fundamental heritage in the history and nature of Norwegian culture. It also constitutes a unique opportunity to develop a contemporary museum concept, nourished by a highly significant urban role and historical responsibility as a cohesive element of the community, not only of Oslo but also of the entire nation.
Its ascending itinerary connects the covered public space of the foyer, which houses recreational, commercial, cultural and restaurant uses, with the rooftop terraces/observatory/club, which parallels the discovery of Edvard Munch’s work offer the different historical strata of the city of Oslo. This gesture of conceiving the vertical communications system as a public space/ascending vantage point is the essence of the heterodox character generated by developing a museum vertically. There is more, however: on this itinerary, the visitors discover other types of facilities, namely restaurant and café, administrative offices, the research library, and the education department, which denote a programmatic complexity that goes beyond the conventional idea of the museum as a set of exhibition spaces to be visited and a series of invisible dependencies from which the institution is managed.