Oslo keeps getting better

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Just after leaving school, I spent a year working in Oslo as an architectural assistant. It was my first trip overseas, and left me with great affection for the country, city and culture, so when I got the opportunity to go back for a few days after half a century, I accepted with alacrity.

At first, little seemed to have changed – apart from one or two obvious additions, such as a cluster of towers in the new CBD by the main station. The centre of the town is still a model of nineteenth-century planning, with the white and yellow neo-Classical royal palace terminating the west end of Karl Johans Gate, the elegant formal main esplanade. On the north side is the university, designed by a pupil of Schinkel; here too are most of the best of the old-fashioned shops, and the Grand Hotel, to which Ibsen tottered twice a day, regular as clockwork.

• Author: Peter Davey.

At the other end of Karl Johan, the parliament building faces the palace; it is a heavy, dull 1860s pale ochre brick Rundbogenstil confection, as redolent of bourgeois heaviness as the palace is of late Enlightenment aristocracy. To the south of Karl Johan is the Town Hall, an amazing, twin towered and immensely solid red brick mixture of National Romanticism and Modernism, the last of the great Scandinavian civic buildings that began with Martin Nyrop's Copenhagen Town Hall, built in the last decade of the nineteenth century loaded with symbols of national identity (Denmark was trying to re-establish a sense of nationhood after loosing Norway to Sweden at the end of the Napoleonic wars).

Oslo town hall

After 1905, when Norway at last became independent again following nearly 600 years of being unhappily ruled by Denmark and then Sweden, it was the country's turn to build its own national monument. After many fits and starts, Magnus Poulsson and Arnstein Arneberg's building was completed in 1950 with noble spaces lavishly decorated with sculpture, tapestries and murals patriotically invoking Viking mythology, the nature of the land and its people, and their heroic resistance to the Nazi occupation.

For all its evocations of battle, the Town Hall must make a memorable backdrop to the annual Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies (Norway is responsible for that award, Sweden the rest), and it is appropriate that the Nobel Peace Centre is just across the vast paved square that separates the Town Hall from the harbour which terminates Oslo fjord in a maze of masts and busy churning ferries.

Nobel peace centre by Adjaye Associates

David Adjaye has created the Nobel centre out of what used to be a little railway terminus. Adjaye has manipulated the building with aplomb, converting the old platform area to galleries, but the exhibition designers faced an almost impossible task in trying to make a three dimensional demonstration of peace. Still, the exterior has been restored, and the building, formerly very run down, has become a charming white Italianate folly overlooking the harbour's rigging towards the medieval brick Akershus castle, surrounded by its unbreeched grey renaissance ramparts. 

A bit further down the quay from the Peace Centre is Aker Brygge, fifty years ago an impenetrable working shipyard, but now a proper new chunk of city, masterplanned by Niels Torp, with housing, offices, entertainment, eating and shopping piled on top and beside each other, old and new formed into a square, streets and alleys. When it was finished some 10 years ago, I paid a half-day visit and was smitten by the scheme's liveliness: it seemed to be quite the most successful piece of postwar inner city planning anywhere in Europe. This time, the place appeared rather subdued, but that was probably more to do with the fact that we went on a wet Lutheran Sunday morning than failure of the plan.

Aker Brygge

Aker Brygge continues to expand into the redundant industrial wasteland on the side of the fjord, but apparently the main criticism of the development continues: for all the mix, there's not enough affordable housing.

A seagull flying east from Aker Brygge over the ships and the castle could alight on the latest major addition to the city centre – the Opera House by Snøhetta. In the process of opening, it forms a huge white marble landscape, reminiscent of a slightly tamed version of Caspar David Friederich's Sea of Ice emerging from the sea at the top end of the eastern harbour, a place that used to be a sleazy, dingy industrialised desert. The Opera is clearly already a major attraction; its slopes and plateaux are covered with people, who have adopted the place as a new park. Work proceeds on putting the horrible road that at present separates the new building from the city into a tunnel under the harbour. Quite soon, the great iceberg will be properly anchored to the shore, and will doubtless transform the area.

Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta

The way in which anyone can wander over the great white expanses of the Opera reminded me of the (to a Brit) extraordinary relaxed fashion in which you can stroll in the park that surrounds the royal palace: from the end of Karl Johan, you can go right up to the royal house – there are no walls or railings, just a few national service guardsmen, dressed in their finest uniforms, under funny black-feathered ceremonial bowler hats.

Oslo is a remarkably calm place, but it is so because people know how to behave. There is very little litter for instance, and virtually no graffiti – hence very few CCTV cameras. Perhaps I should have stayed 50 years ago, but then I would have had to face the prices (roughly twice British), and the food which, instead of being fresh and simple as it used to be, is too often Americo-Italian – second-rate pizzas, pastas and the like. Happily, the taste for the bland and inauthentic has not yet overwhelmed architecture.