(2020) Deichman Bjorvika library, and then Oslo’s mayor – who had earlier handed over a unique and long-awaited contract committing the city of Oslo to supporting and maintaining the project through its 100 year life cycle – cut the ribbon on the Silent Room, which is located on its fourth floor.


Paterson admits there was a huge amount of luck involved in Oslo having a new library scheduled, and a director very sympathetic to her idea. Together with the library architects Lundhagen and Atelier Oslo, Paterson evolved the Silent Room’s look and feel. She wanted a place of ‘simplicity, purity and quiet’. And having spent a few minutes there – with my shoes off, a must for all visitors – I can vouch that it already feels like a place pregnant with the workings of multiple imaginations, still smelling of freshly carved timber.


For its form and materials, the collaborators took inspiration from caves as well as temples,


old and new. Its contours are formed from 16,000 wooden blocks – stacked in layers, like growth rings – all carved from the Nordmarka trees felled through that 2014 clearing. Tere are 100 hand-blown glass windows, which front the metal drawers where the manuscripts will be placed and locked, each glass strip bearing the artist’s name, the year, and the title (the only hint offered as to the manuscript’s contents). Tanks to their LED backlighting, they glimmer like liquid golden perforations in the textured wooden tiles that wrap around the whole space, suggesting a warm, enveloping, almost womb-like contouring, which hugs you close. A shimmer of natural daylight penetrates the room thanks to slim skylights. For the spirit of it, Paterson was particularly inspired by a 2017 visit to a Japanese Shinto temple. She told me: ‘It’s a shrine called Ise Jingu. Tey rebuild the temple there every 20 years, using new wood


but building the temple in exactly the same form. Tey’ve been doing this for 2,000 years. It’s extraordinary. It’s this contemporary place that is so imbued with the past you can’t separate them at all. Te trees they use come from a sacred mountain where they grow [them] specifically for the temples. Tat crept in for me when we designed the room: the trees, which have, for me, some kind of sacredness, become this room that will span time, and outlive us all.’


As I sit in this wooden cave – which will be open to all visitors during library hours – I am reminded of what Paterson said at the conference in the trees: ‘Tis project addresses basic human needs and desires: to connect with nature, to connect with time, both time past and time future.’ I conclude that, of all the works of art I have ever encountered, this is the one that might remind us to use that time wisely and use it well.


LEFT: EINAR ASLAKSEN FAR LEFT: VERONICA SIMPSON


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