‘An unbelievable phallic landmark!’ The grain silo gallery, a present from the trillion greenback man

If you’ve ever puzzled what it could really feel prefer to be as insignificant as a kernel of corn, now you can get a good suggestion in Kristiansand, a metropolis in southern Norway. Standing on the fourth flooring of its new Kunstsilo artwork museum, carved out of an outdated Thirties grain silo, you’ll be able to peer down a vertiginous concrete tube that plunges in the direction of huddles of ant-like individuals beneath. Or you’ll be able to lookup, by extra concrete shafts, in the direction of tiny circles of sky. You’ll be able to mimic the journey of a grain by climbing a spiral staircase inside one of many cylinders, or take a look at your nerves by strolling on a glass-floored terrace suspended over one other shaft, floating above a tubular abyss. It’s a dramatic spatial spectacle – and we haven’t even acquired to the artwork but.

As soon as residence to fifteen,000 tonnes of grain, this mighty concrete mountain is now a repository of a very powerful assortment of Nordic trendy artwork on the planet. It’s a 5,500-strong haul spanning work, drawings, ceramics, sculpture and full-size architectural installations, telling the story of the previous century of abstraction, surrealism and expressionism throughout Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark – inside one of many final symbols of modernity itself.

“The magnificent first fruits of the brand new age,” is how modernist maestro Le Corbusier described grain silos, to which he devoted a whole chapter in his 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Structure. For modernists, silos have been the right expression of type following operate, monuments of storage and symbols of worldwide commerce, stripped of surplus decoration. For Bauhaus boss Walter Gropius, they have been “nearly as spectacular of their monumental energy because the buildings of historic Egypt”. They nonetheless maintain an irresistible attract, standing as industrial cathedrals of pure geometric kinds. However what needs to be executed with these redundant hulks now?

“It was an actual headache,” says Mathias Bernander, mayor of Kristiansand, the place the 40m tall cluster of silos had stood vacant since 2008, occupying a main waterfront spot. “The constructing was protected, however ineffective.” Designed by considered one of Norway’s main functionalist architects, Arne Korsmo, the 30 concrete cylinders had been listed in 2010, however there was no concept what to do with them. Plans to show the constructing right into a lodge had proved not possible. “It was value nothing,” says Bernander. “It truly had a minus worth, as a result of it was extra of an issue than an asset.”

In 2012, a live performance corridor was constructed to 1 aspect of the silo, within the type of an extravagantly undulating shed. A couple of years later, a improvement of pricey waterfront flats began to look on the opposite aspect. However the silo remained, a cussed relic blocking the waterfront regeneration. Then, as if in a Nordic fairytale, alongside got here one of many metropolis’s former kids, who had since develop into one of many nation’s wealthiest males. And he was in search of an attention-grabbing place to deal with his sprawling assortment of artwork.

“We walked round city considering, ‘The place could be good to have our museum?’” says Nicolai Tangen. “Then there it was – this unbelievable phallic landmark!” Tangen isn’t any stranger to looking for meaty alternatives. The 57-year-old made his fortune as a hedge fund supervisor in London, and now heads the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, the most important of its variety on the planet – lending him the nickname Norway’s “trillion-dollar man”.

He started amassing artwork within the Nineteen Nineties, and have become so enamoured he took a sabbatical to review for an MA at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2003. Amassing a museum-quality horde of Nordic trendy artwork turned an obsession, however realising his dream of a spot to show it in his residence city was no simple trip.

“It was all hunky dory and optimistic at first,” says Tangen. “After which, bang!” That was the sound of the residents of Kristiansand studying that they have been on the hook for co-funding the challenge. The constructing wasn’t to be only a personal museum, however a joint residence for town’s present artwork assortment – a controversial deal that price the then-mayor his job. Of the £52m complete price, Tangen’s basis has contributed about £15.5m (half of the full price got here from public sources, the remaining from personal grants and a financial institution mortgage).

“I may have paid for the entire museum,” Tangen says, “however then it could not have been a present. For one thing to be taken care of, individuals must take part within the preliminary funding. In case you get a kitten without spending a dime, you’ll take care of it lower than if you need to pay £10.”

Judging by the crowds on the opening occasion, most native residents appear thrilled with their new kitten, the controversies a distant reminiscence. Folks flooded into the bottom flooring atrium, the place the silos have been hollowed out to create a 21-metre excessive void, and home windows look down into the house from landings above.

One silo holds the staircase, fantastically crafted in oak, its curved white metal balustrade bulging into the atrium, whereas one other hugs a curved semicircular couch on every flooring. Proof of the substantial surgical procedures has been left uncovered, with the silos’ concrete edges sawn and floor, revealing chunky mixture and rusted metal reinforcement bars.

“We wished to make a distinction between the rugged silo and the brand new, exact components,” says Magnus Wåge of Barcelona-based Mestres Wåge Arquitectes, who received the challenge in an open worldwide competitors, with Mendoza Partida and BAX studio. Their first concept was to show the silos themselves into labyrinthine exhibition areas, however they discovered it could have been nearly not possible to show work. “So we determined it was higher to make the silo right into a type of sculpture on the centre, opening it up right into a basilica-like house.”

The galleries are organized on both aspect of the momentous void, 3,000 sq metres of standard white dice house throughout three ranges, housed in a brand new block on one aspect, and a rebuilt former storehouse on the opposite. Largely windowless, with comparatively low ceilings, and separated from the atrium by two units of sliding glass doorways for environmental causes, they really feel a bit lifeless, making a monotonous sequence relieved solely by returning again into the gaping atrium.

It’s a comparable expertise to visiting Thomas Heatherwick’s Zeitz Mocaa museum in Cape City, additionally housed in a former grain silo, the place the fiendish acrobatic feat of carving an ovoid quantity out of the concrete tubes clearly trumped creating the very best areas for the show of artwork. In each buildings, the hollowed-out industrial cadaver is the actual star of the present.

For all their claims of “adaptive reuse”, each initiatives are additionally closely rebuilt. It seems that ageing concrete silos will not be truly able to being sawn and sliced fairly as a lot as architects would possibly hope. As in Cape City, the Kristiansand construction needed to have a 250mm-thick sleeve of concrete forged across the present 150mm-thick cylinders, in addition to a further lattice of concrete beams threaded by the tubes to stabilise the construction.

The freshly entombed silos have been then insulated and completed with a white plaster render to revive the look of the unique construction, solely a bit chubbier. No embodied carbon evaluation has been carried out, however the environmental argument of “reusing” the constructing on this approach, when such a considerable quantity of latest concrete needed to be poured, is questionable – particularly when the spatial drama of the silos in each circumstances is confined to the atrium.

Nonetheless, it’s simple to overlook about all this whenever you’re up on the roof. Whereas Heatherwick’s constructing is topped with an exorbitant boutique lodge, the Kunstsilo summit homes a restaurant with a spectacular roof deck open to all. Right here, guests can sit behind rows of glass fins, organized to permit a frisson of sea breeze to movement by the gaps, and revel in views throughout to the container port the opposite aspect of the harbour. You may as well gawp on the colossal cruise ships, disgorging hundreds of passengers a day into the city – their touchdown zone finally to be linked to the museum’s waterfront promenade by a footbridge.

Till now, the chief lure of Norway’s sunniest metropolis has been a zoo and amusement park, themed across the widespread pirate character Captain Sabertooth, which attracts 1.2 million guests a 12 months. Its former director, Reidar Fuglestad, was poached to move up Kunstsilo, within the hope he would possibly make it an equally widespread attraction.

“It suppose this challenge takes Kristiansand from a small city to an enormous city,” says Tangen. “I don’t suppose it’s turning into Bilbao immediately. However I really like the thought of getting an irritating little museum right here placing on the perfect reveals, in order that these well-resourced museums in Oslo say, ‘Geez, what’s happening down there?’”