Oslo’s Opera House, designed by Snøhetta and completed in 2007, marked the first major intervention in Oslo’s Bjørvika waterfront transformation, converting a former industrial harbour into a publicly accessible urban landscape. Its sloping white roof descends seamlessly to the water, inviting people to walk up from the city and move across the building as if it were part of the ground itself. Emerging from the fjord like a glacial mass, the building recalls the presence of an iceberg, not as literal form but through its scale, brightness, and relationship to water. While the roof appears continuous from the exterior, the main auditorium volume rises independently within the line of the balustrades to achieve the necessary acoustic height, subtly altering the roof geometry and creating an elevated viewing point toward the city and the fjord.

Materiality plays a central structural and sensory role. The primary roof surfaces are clad in white La Facciata marble from the Carrara quarries, whose patterning, cuts, and lifted edges were developed in close collaboration with artists to produce a shifting play of light and shadow across the stone. Areas exposed to water and the north facade are finished in Norwegian Ice Green granite, selected for durability and tonal depth. Full scale prototypes were tested extensively to refine surface texture and colour nuance, supported by a continuous quality control process throughout production. As construction progressed, significant ground settlement around the building required adaptive responses, reinforcing the opera house as both a precise architectural object and a long term negotiation with unstable terrain. The result is a building where technical resolution, artistic collaboration, and public accessibility are inseparably woven into the architectural language.