Oslo City Hall & Nobel Peace Center
Today is my first full day in Oslo. The morning included visits to the Oslo City Hall and the Nobel Peace Center.
But first, a tangential note.
In yesterday’s post about my arrival in Oslo, I mentioned that the daylight hours are very long here this time of year. The curtains in my hotel room are blackout quality. The two panels are on separate tracks that overlap considerably. So no light flows through the crack that inevitably remains when trying to shut curtains on a single rod.
However, considerable light spills around the sides of the closed curtains by the walls. Consequently, I woke up much earlier than I would have liked. As a result, I’ve neither caught up on my sleep nor gotten over my jet lag. So I might drag a little bit more today than you’d expect, even for a man my age.
But that’s enough whining for now.
Oslo City Hall
Both of the guidebooks I’m using on this trip highly recommend visiting Oslo City Hall. One of them, I forget which, said that, unlike in most of the rest of Europe, in Scandinavia, city halls, not churches, are usually the major sights to see.
Oslo City Hall consists of two towers on either side of a lower-rise section. In honour of my visit, one of the towers is currently surrounded, top to bottom, with scaffolding. The scaffolding on the back and side walls is bare, but the front has some sort of white shrouding on it.
The exterior is handsome, probably more so when both towers are naked, but most of the beauty is inside.
Entry into Oslo City Hall is free and there are a few free guided tours of it throughout the day. I knew about the tours, but not their times. As my luck would have it, I arrived 15 minutes after the start of one and there were only three today. But one of the staff told me I could join the ongoing tour and she led me to where it was.
Just past the entrance to Oslo City Hall is a cavernous great hall rising two tall storeys high. Huge murals by local artists adorn the walls. The guided tour had already passed through this hall so I don’t have much information on it.
Most of the other public rooms in Oslo City Hall are on the second level. They surround the atrium of the main hall.
Because the ground floor great hall spans two storeys, the grand hall hollows out the space in the centre of this floor. The path on this level is through the rooms, not through corridors. So, to get to a room you generally have to walk through one or two others. Today is Saturday and nothing was going on other than tourists gawking, but I’d think it might be somewhat disruptive to have people walking through rooms where some sort of activity is happening.
I joined the tour in the first room on the second floor. I mentioned above the murals in the great hall. Murals are a constant theme of Oslo City Hall.
When the city hall was built, the city commissioned local artists to paint murals on the walls. They cover most of the walls, from a little above the floor to the ceiling, of most of the rooms. The ceilings sport decorations too. The guide provided information on the function of each room along with the artists and iconography of the murals in the rooms.
One of the stories I remember is about the mural on the north wall of the banquet hall (you can see the mural in the background of the picture of the banquet hall somewhere near this paragraph). While most of the murals elsewhere in Oslo City Hall are frescoes, this one, by Willi Middelfart (no, I didn’t remember that; I had to look it up; and I refuse to make a juvenile joke about the last four letters of his last name), was painted on canvas and then stuck to the wall.
The painting was done before the room was completed. Middelfart and the architects had a big argument before Middelfart started work on the painting.
The architects insisted there had to be a door in that wall because it’s the banquet hall and the kitchen is on the other side of that wall. And they wanted two doors for symmetry.
The artist was furious about the doors jutting into his work. After intense negotiations, Middelfart and the architects agreed that there would be a door, but the architects gave up their demand for a second one.
Middelfart started work on his painting offsite. When construction of the banquet hall was finished, he went to see it and was furious to find that, despite their agreement, there were two doors in the wall.
The artist had to adjust his work, a depiction of the people of Oslo enjoying a summer day by the fjord. As part of his adjustment, he added a boy pointing at and mocking the second door.
According to the guide, that door is never used. It is there solely to provide symmetry. (I can’t help wondering if, after Middelfart argued with the architects, the architects put it there not so much for symmetry, but to piss off Middlefart.)
Paintings of the current king and queen of Norway and a couple of past kings hang on one of the other walls in the banquet hall. I don’t think this was the portrait artist’s intent, but, in my view, the paintings of the current king and queen make them look like zombies dressed in regalia. (I posted an image of the two paintings above. You decide.) According to the guide, many locals were furious about the paintings, but the king wasn’t troubled by it and said that if that’s what he looks like then that’s what he wants the painting to look like. So the paintings remain.
This floor also holds the city council chamber. City councillors sit in arced rows of connected desks facing the ornate dais where the mayor sits. The room is subtly attractive.
Nobel Peace Center
First, a comment about the “Center” in “Nobel Peace Center.” That comment is “grrr.” Speaking as the Canadian I am, it’s spelled Centre, not Center, dammit. But the English on the building’s signage uses “Center” throughout, so, grrr, that’s what I’ll go with here.
The Nobel Peace Center is a museum dedicated to the Nobel Peace Prize. The first floor contains a room with exhibits on Alfred Nobel and the history of the Nobel Peace Prize. I was on a guided tour of this room.
Alfred Nobel had no heirs and his will stipulated that all of his assets must be sold upon his death and all of the proceeds, along with any cash he had, must go into a fund, the earnings of which pay for the Nobel Prizes each year. There were originally five Nobel prizes: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. A six, economics, was added after Nobel’s death and is funded by a different pool of money.
Five of the current six Nobel Prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. The Nobel Peace Prize is the only one that is awarded in Oslo. Why? According to the guide, nobody knows. That’s just what Nobel specified in his will. He didn’t say why.
According to the guide, most people think that Nobel set up the Nobel Prizes to atone for having invented dynamite and making most of his fortune from the arms industry. That’s the story that I had heard. According to the guide, nobody is sure that’s true. Nobel didn’t say.
There’s some speculation that a secretary who worked for him briefly, Bertha von Suttner, inspired him to create the prizes, the Peace Prize in particular. Nobel became infatuated with Suttner and, after just one week, proposed to her. She turned him down.
Suttner was originally from Austria, at some point, she moved back and married another man there.
Despite her refusing Nobel’s proposal and moving back to Austria, the two remained close.
Suttner was a staunch peace activist, was a driving force in setting up the international court, and wrote a book titled “Lay Down Your Arms.”
When the prizes were established after Nobel’s death, in 1905, Suttner was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Upstairs in the Nobel Peace Center there was a temporary exhibit about Yoko Ono and included some works by her. Ono never won a Nobel Peace Prize but the committee felt she deserves recognition in the museum for her work related to the criteria set out for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The second floor also contains the “Nobel Peace Field.” It’s a room with flowing rows of screens mounted on poles. Each screen depicts a different Nobel Peace Prize winner from over the years and provides some information about them. I spotted a few that I recognized without having to read the accompanying text, including the 1957 winner, Lester B. Pearson. Non-Canadians reading this probably don’t know, but he later became Prime Minister of Canada. I believe he was the only Canadian to win a Nobel Peace Prize so far.
By the way, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded at the almost next-door Oslo City Hall, so that put a nice bow on my two morning activities.
Discover more from Joel's Journeys & Jaunts
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Thank you for the tour this morning! I had no idea what to expect in Oslo in terms of monuments, and these are pretty interesting (as are the anecdotes). I was intrigued by the neo-Renaissance Italianate facade and unusual shape of the Nobel Peace Center (grrr), and found out that it was built as a railway station in the 19th century. Oh, those fanciful Norwegians, dreaming of the south. As to your sleep problems, I hope you saved your Air Canada eye mask. Could come in handy. Hope you catch up tonight.
I can count on you to tell me about the architectural styles I didn’t recognize. Thanks.
And I didn’t know about the train station. So thanks for that too.
I used the eye mask on the plane, but didn’t take it with me I’m regretting that. I might ask the hotel if it can supply one.