Quartier gouvernemental à Oslo : Ce qu’il sera, ou ne sera pas (après avoir eété en partie détruit par les attaques de Breivik en juillet 2011)
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“A building is just a building” Labour politician Rigmor Aasrud, then Minister of Government Administration and Church Affairs, categorically stated a few months after the terrorist attack of July 22. She was talking about the heavily damaged Høyblokka, the actual target of the assault. And indeed, until the attack, Erling Viksjø’s 1958 Høyblokka, the vertical axis of Oslo’s government district, and his elegantly curved 1969 Y-Blokka, were largely perceived as regular office buildings; they not even were listed as heritage monuments.
Even given the reservation that late modernist buildings are met with all over the world, Aasrud’s misreading of Viksjø’s edifices is remarkable. The building ensemble is not only one of Viksjøs masterpieces, a Gesamtkunstwerk carefully embedding artworks as an integral part of its structure; it is also a pivotal architectural image signifying Norway’s post-war social democracy, the epitome of the Labour party’s short-lived alliance with the avant-garde. It is all the more surprising that a Labour-led government was willing to dismiss this significant complex as “just a building”.
