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The art of Oslo; Modern: present-day vessels moored up on the Oslo harbourside Snow joke: the opera house's sloping marble roofs turn the whole building into a sort of elevated park Ancient: ocean-going craft at the Viking Ship Museum the great outdoors: Gustav Vigelands lugubrious carvings dominate Oslos popular sculpture park.

Article Excerpt
Byline: Rowan Moore

BUT FOR the legendary cost of taxis and coffee you should walk, if you can, and live caffeine-free there's not much to tell you that Oslo is the capital of an oil-rich nation.

It's not Dubai, with its glittering towers of excess.

It's a calm, dignified, pleasant place, very nice for a few days, even if over the years its measured rationality could make you want, with Edvard Munch, to scream.

Or rather Oslo was like this until this year when they opened their new opera house, a work of refined extravagance that is clad from top to bottom in Carrara marble, almost every piece of which is individually cut and textured.

It is richly adorned with specially commissioned artworks and inside with curving timber galleries. It's not flash, but reassuringly expensive.

This building changes the tenor of the city.

It's not just the luxury, it's also the emphasis it gives to culture.

Until now Oslo's big thing was its contact with nature and the great outdoors: forests a short bus-ride away and an easy rapport between the city and the tideless Baltic.

Oslo is draped around a fjord dotted full of islands,...

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