SCANDI NAVIAN MODERN

This year is Oslo's time to shine as contemporary art, architecture and a burgeoning food scene give the Norwegian capital a vibrant new edge.

- James Stewart

From a dock at Bjørvika in central Oslo, a man rows into the fjord, following a ribbon of silver water as sunset flames the clouds. His wooden boat is naggingly familiar to anyone from northern Europe: high, pinched bow and stern; as slippery as a fish. In such designs, from this very fjord, the Vikings conquered and traded from Constantinople to Newfoundland.

What’s extraordinary about this image, though, is what’s behind him. The dock bristles with a panoply of doubletake architecture. There’s the glass skinned Deichman Bjørvika public library, its upper storey fanned out at an implausible angle. Jostling for space behind is a design book’s worth of office and apartment blocks: cubes, cantilevered rectangles, ziggurats. There’s also the Opera House I’m standing on, beside a young family having a picnic, gaggles of teenagers and tourists taking selfies. The roof slants all the way down to the broad plaza, doubling as a ramp. Around 100 of us are gathered at the top on this chill late-winter dusk to experience one of the finest viewpoints in the city. And what really astounds about this cutting-edge cityscape is that 20 years ago, the docks of Bjørvika housed nothing more exciting than shipping containers.

There are three things you need to know about Oslo. One is that the Norwegian capital, with a population of 700,000 people, is a pipsqueak by European standards. The second is that Norwegians are no enthusiasts of change. Things aren’t as good as they were, they grumble happily. And third, keep in mind that until 1969, this was a nation of fishermen and farmers.