GB: The urban area itself is quite complex and manifold, containing a whole series of situations that have arisen from various planning gestures over time. In many ways, the site is like a back eddy in all of these gestures. So being contextual here also means responding to a number of unresolved existing conditions, many of which counteract each other...

TMQ: And the presence of a hotel whose height 'challenges' that of City Hall is a result of a financial condition: 'city hall' can't pay for its library, so it needs to sell off profitable commercial space in order to finance it. Is it possible that the project, by extending the notion of 'context' to social and political areas, is making some uncomfortable facts come to light?

GB: Well, I hadn't thought about it like that before, but you may have a point. The simpler answer to the question of controversy is that, just as the City Hall was in its time quite novel in the context of Oslo, this project is also quite innovative, and I think that this very simple answer is close to the truth. The project does not resemble anything in its context. It introduces a new scale. While architects and urbanists can understand the planning gestures that have resulted in this context, for the person in the street there tends only to be the familiar and the unfamiliar. I think that this may be the real answer, since I have seen how people's opinions change as a result of more information or simply seeing the project several times. This is especially true at a political level. Maybe this is a little naive, but I think it's true—and in this way, the critique of the project is really not very profound.

But of course, it's much easier to be distracted by a monument that only refers to itself. If you begin with this, and concentrate on it, you can look away from the various issues that are confronting the situation and how they may be solved. I'll have to admit that there were times during work on the competition that we were tempted to smack something down in the middle of the site and be done with it. But we have some experience working with libraries, and much of OMA's work on this kind of program has to do with deinstitutionalizing them—of thinking of them somehow as information stores or information mixing chambers, of bringing the library into a more open relation with its urban context. But considering the project as a monument counteracts this process. It may have been productive for getting the project built more quickly, but we would have lost too many important aspects. The compact urban plan responds to these various contexts and conditions, allowing for deinstitutionalization, and a kind of 'urban living room' that can counterweigh City Hall's exterior urban space. The complexity of the program and the context really calls for a compact urban plan of this kind.

TMQ: Are these difficulties characteristic of planning and building in Oslo?

GB: The real difficulty in the discussion that has emerged around this process is getting some kind of clarity about what kinds of priorities exist for this site, both politically and economically. There are those who say that the novelty of the project is its worst enemy—and that a much more run of the mill project would have already been finalized. This is a central aspect of the social-democratic system, in which all parties have their say, and there is very little central leadership that can guide a project like this through its stages. But we see that there are other social democracies that manage this in a more effective way, such as in Holland or France. Our first question upon learning that we had won the competition was: "Who is really passionate about getting this built, who will guide it through?" But we quickly realized this person does not exist. It is instructive to compare this situation with that of the project for China Central Television (the national television station of the People's Republic of China). This is a gigantic project—575,000 square meters—that was being designed at OMA concurrently. These two projects were in blue foam at the same time! And the Chinese project is already underway.

In some ways Oslo is still having difficulties understanding how to develop. I think the greatest challenge for the city now is to begin to see that it is in evolution—the city is not a static thing. There is a tendency to wait out the lowest common denominator when it comes to major change. An unwillingness to confront risk, and to explore the ways in which the city is in movement, and how it can change. There is a lot of talk of the 'diversity' of Oslo, but there is still very little exploration of what this means or how it can be engaged.