under

The international architecture group Snøhetta (which is seeming rather busy these days) has released concept images for a new undertaking outside of Oslo at the southernmost point along the Norwegian coast, a monolithic submerged structure that’s more than an aquatic dining experience for patrons but also a unique marine research facility. The gourmet restaurant is to be named simply under (also Norsk for something that’s a wonder) and will have a panoramic view and an outer surface conducive to barnacles and other reef-dwellers sheltering there, making the structure part of the environment that is the subject of its study.

må jeg skjære ham i fingeren? må jeg rive ham i håret?

Synchronised to a two-dimensional physics simulation, animator DoodleChaos’ line-rider rendering of Edvard Grieg’s (previously) In the Hall of the Mountain King was a rather thrilling sled ride. You should definitely have the speakers on full blast for this one and watch it through to the end when it gets really harrowing.

incidental music

We enjoyed this appreciation of not only of the musical stylings of Edvard Grieg but how the snatches of sound and motifs have thoroughly inundated popular culture—resounding especially through the composer’s accompaniment to the stage play Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen, nearly on par with the Strum und Drang of Richard Wagner. Although one might not be able to name or attribute In the Hall of the Mountain King or Morning Mood (Morgenstemning—and we agree it’s funny to call any song a mood), all those works are instantly recognisable, evocative and indulgent.

après nous, le déluge

Though the breach did not result in any loss of the seeds stored within and scientists are working to make the structure more secure, the fact that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault built in 2008 and designed to weather an eternity of assault is already showing signs that it’s not able to withstand catastrophic, run-away climate change is a depressing prospect. The integrity and diversity of seed banks has already been demonstrated as vital to rehabilitating civilisation and there are multiple repositories all over the world, and while it is frightening enough to find this ark prone to flooding due to melting permafrost, it’s an even more arresting thought that there will be no place where these food crops might be grown because of radical changes in temperatures and long-term weather patterns.

fengsel or recidivism-rate

Recognising that for some, the loss of liberty is punishment enough, one progressive incarceration facility on a Norwegian island, garnering the reputation of the world’s nicest, is demonstrating itself as one of the most effective for rehabilitating criminals and has the lowest rate of re-offending.
The experimental prison on the island of Bastøy is just off the coast from Oslo and was once infamous for a violent uprising in an earlier incarnation as a juvenile detention colony in 1915 but since 1982 has embodied a model that is diametrically opposed to its roots—with inmates accommodated in cottages instead of cells, work the prison garden and are afforded other amenities, including high-quality education and skills-building programmes and guards that are trained social workers. The penal system of the Scandinavian countries is the exclusive bailiwick of expert criminologists and not the emotionally-charged plaything of politicians. Inasmuch as confinement is its own indignity (violence only begets violence) and can be reforming—for some victims of criminals, and there are murderers and rapists at this minimum security facility, no amount of punishment meted out could ever be enough. What do you think? Bastøy’s success rate suggests that taking vengeance out of the equation and replacing it with respect and redemption might be the best way to fight crime.

uidentifisert flygande objekt

Informed by Geoff Manaugh’s ever excellent BLDGBLOG, we learn that a Norwegian valley due to a collusion of geochemistry is a natural battery.
One of the parallel ranges is rich in copper and the opposite side zinc with a vein of sulphur in between. Even if there is adequate explanation for what’s known as the Hessdalen phenomenon and its ball lightning that were often taken for alien craft or even stranger things, it’s no less remarkable that Nature can prefigure human invention and makes me think of those infernal coal fires around the world or the naturally occurring nuclear fission in the central Africa. I wonder what other genius lies outdoors that we’re unable to recognise yet.

lido deck

In what seems like a scene from an increasingly more daunting and improbable action, demolition movie, as Super Punch informs, luxury automotive manufacturer Ferrari and a Norwegian cruise-line are teaming up to furnish the Shanghai to Tianjin route with a leviathan of a boat which will have a double-decker race track on board, among other amenities. Would you like this sort of vacation experience?  That’s a far cry certainly from a nice and sedate round of shuffle-board.

😱

The theory that Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (Skrik) has its sky coloured by memories of the eruption of Krakatoa, which made the sunsets very dramatic in the whole of the Western Hemisphere for an entire year a decade prior to the work’s painting has been circulating since 2004 (the year it was stolen from an Oslo museum—to be recovered two years later. Now, however, geoscientists and meteorologists (it’s strange to think that the weather reporter is the only scientist that many of us see on regular basis) believe the swirling clouds may represent a recently classified but rarely occurring formation called a polar stratospheric or mother-of-pearl cloud, which become iridescent when the winter sun dips below the horizon.

back-up copy

Adjacent to the World Arctic Seed Vault on the island Spitsbergen Norway has just opened a new doomsday archive for civilisation’s data, calling for submissions considered especially culturally significant.
Volume of course is not infinite and something to be discounted as a negotiable commodity as the information is transferred on to multi-layered film and stored in a format that isn’t dependent on a given operating system or media format, in case the worst case scenario comes to pass and all of the underlying support structure crumbles. At the time of publication, the two countries have submitted caches of data, Brazil and Mexico.

fjord fairlane

Ground-breaking is to begin next year in Norway to create the world’s first waterway tunnel to be navigable by large, steamer-sized vessels, as Super Punch reports. The seventeen hundred metre massive engineering project is not meant to make sea-faring routes shorter by carving out a short-cut or more direct path, but rather to protect ships at this most treacherous point along the Norwegian coast, entering the Stadhavet Sea where the waters and weather of the North and Norwegian seas come together quite violently.

7x7

nine lives: wild turkeys ritually encircle a dead cat on Boston street

terra-forming: NASA suggests that by recharging the Martian magnetic field, the planet would become more amenable to colonisation

gakubuchi: commemorating when the burlesque show came to Japan through vintage advertising

ditto: Norwegian media site is experimenting with a reading comprehension quiz that commentators must pass before they’re allowed to chime in—maybe this should apply to sharing as well

best in show: highlights from the Smithsonian’s annual photography competition, via the always inspiring Nag on the Lake

all-star: surreal Disney sports-themed resort

dance, magic dance: Firey plush figure from Labyrinth, whose performance was choreographed by Dr Crusher

skyfall ranch

BBC Future shares the story of the unassuming retreat called Drumintoul Lodge in the Scottish highlands that during World War II was covert host to an international commando school under the auspices of the Special Operations Executive for resistance fighters from all countries threatened by the Axis powers, defectors and spies.
The campus was particularly a good training ground to its contingent of Norwegian guerrillas that matriculated on this estate in the Cairngorms as the barren, wind-swept plateau was a lot like the native homeland that they sought to protect. The Norwegians trained in sabotage techniques which proved vital in ultimately preventing the Nazis from developing a nuclear bomb. Deuterium (heavy water) is needed to moderate fission reactions (it being less prone to strip away neutrons and enable a run-away reaction) so the detonation could be controlled and only one hydro-electric plant in the world was capable of producing heavy water at the time—in Nazi-occupied Norway. Raids that operatives trained for in Drumintoul were launched against the facilities at the base of the Rjukan waterfall in Telemark, which stopped production capability.

7x7

so disappoint: vast gallery of retail fails of products that did not live up to expectations, via Boing Boing

a la carte: NYC Public Library system is transcribing historic menus to see how diets and tastes have changed over the years, via the always marvellous Nag on the Lake

exhibition, exposition: collection of creative art installations from the past year

found footage: honoured among the worst films ever made, Turkish ‘Star Wars’ is being conserved

no static at all: despite lack of enthusiasm from the listening public, Norway’s FM radio broadcasts are about to sign-off

entropy, zoetrope: hypnotic biological simulations that are collaborations from Max Cooper and Maxime Causeret

intercalary: artsy and hopeful collection of calendars for chronicling 2017 

dongle or airdrop

I knew that the close-proximity wireless data transfer was the namesake of Viking ruler Harald Bluetooth and even bore his runic initials in the medium’s symbol, but I ought not have just been pleased and satisfied with that bit of trivia and not wondered why.
The person of Bluetooth, to whom that moniker was given for his fondness of blueberries, was interestingly the second king of a uniting Denmark and Norway and father of the first canonical Danish king of England, Sven Forkbeard. An engineer at the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson who was working in 1997 on a way to synchronise devices, mobile phones with computers at the time, at close range was reading a history of Scandinavia at the time and choose “Bluetooth” as the working title for their project—in collaboration with Finnish Nokia. Once the technology had been worked out and they were ready to unveil this new feature, on the advice of marketers they nearly named the ad-hoc networking feature Flirt—close but not touching, but harking back to the original implication behind the name—for the king who brought together diverse tribes into a single united kingdom (and made them all into Christians as well), they wisely and artfully decided to stick with Bluetooth in the end.

oppdemmingspolitikk

I was a bit floored by the by posturing and threats that Russia had for Norway over plans to host a rotational detachment of some three hundred US Marines in Værnes near Trondheim, not so much for the way plenipotentiaries are want to escalate anything to do with the perception of NATO expansion, but that Norway wasn’t already host—or considered host to US troops. I didn’t think the small but continued presence at Stavanger was a secret (or had closed shop)—we even passed by it, and maybe the locations are secret but the US is known also to store vast amounts of materiel and munitions in tunnels and bunkers in the fjords and mountains as forward supply in case tensions were to rise. Who would have guessed that policies and plans implemented back during the Cold War era, and sustained out of inertia, would now be the object of scrutiny and contention?

a moveable beast

Via the enchanting Messy Nessy Chic, we are treated to the rare sight of antique taxidermy specimens from Bergen’s Natural History Museum (the historic Hanseatic trading houses of the Bryggen port are the second from the bottom), as captured by photographer Helge Skodvin, as they are carefully moved to temporary quarters while the museum undergoes extensive restoration. The whole menagerie is really a delight to peruse and this undertaking reminds me of how the first provisional government of West Germany was convened in the Zoological Museum of Bonn, with a similar assortment of creatures in the gallery, as many were too big or delicate to move.

sturz oder post and lintel

Goslar has been honoured with an ensemble of UNESCO accolades, some tied to a place and some not, and so it was pretty remarkable to find another piece of World Heritage reconstructed in one of the suburbs of the town.
In Hahnenklee, there is a stave church, called the Gustav-Adolf (named after the Swedish monarch that reigned during the Thirty Years’ War and made his country a European power) and was constructed in 1907, inspired by those outstanding examples to be found in Norway.
Many of the main architectural elements come from the iconic edifice of Borgund, but the wooden structure is a pastiche of all then surviving examples. The interior felt like being in the galley of a great wooden ship, a reflection of the Vikings’ sea-going skills translated to architecture and preserved for the ages.
The organ, housed in all that ornate carpentry, was something brilliant in itself but the musical possibilities don’t end there. Just separated from the congregation hall stands a belfry that houses a carillon (Glockenspiel) and a very skilled carilloneur gives performances on the church lawn in the summers.

fjord fairlane

Although I was delighted every time we had to take a ferry whilst navigating Norway, I could imagine that the routine could get a little grating for a daily commute, and so as TYWKIWDBI informs—the country may soon be offering drivers an alternative in the form of tubular floating bridges that are buoyant at a point several metres below the surface of the water. The unconventional engineering is required, which should be rather seamless for drivers in a land already replete with underwater tunnels, as the fjords’ terrain is too difficult to raise a traditional bridge and delve too deeply to drill a regular tunnel—plus spoiling the scenery too, I suppose.

protocol and perfidy

No wonder Oslo withdrew its candidacy for the 2022 Winter Games, leaving it to Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan to duke it out amongst themselves for the dubious honour of hosting the Olympics, given this rather unappetizing list of demands hurled at them by the steering committee.
Via the always brilliant Boing Boing, we are given a taste—and mind you, this catalogue is not on behalf of the athletes and does not even begin to address larger matters like venues, onerous security and logistics, just the bed and board for the organisers—of what the queen bees had expected, causing Norway to laugh them out of the country:

• The hotel bar at their hotel should extend its hours “extra late” and the minibars must stock Coke products.
• The IOC president shall be welcomed ceremoniously on the runway when he arrives.
• The IOC members should have separate entrances and exits to and from the airport.
• During the opening and closing ceremonies a fully stocked bar shall be available. During competition days, wine and beer will do at the stadium lounge.

two-by-four

The always engaging Everlasting Blört shares a gallery from Popular Mechanics of some of the finest timber structures from around the world—including a couple that only exist as blue-prints so far. We haven’t visited any of these select sites yet (but the Borgund stave church ought to have made the cut, in our humble opinion)—and surely for the modern buildings, we wouldn’t have appreciated that they were made of wood, but I think from now on we’ll be on the lookout. Given the changing tastes for building materials and construction approaches, it’s rather nice that architects are rethinking traditional methods and willing to challenge the assumed limitations of lumber, with a wooden skyscraper slated for London’s skyline to rival the Shard.