Spanning 15,000 square-feet, sprawling across the beautiful Randselva river, in northern Europe’s largest sculptural park stands ‘The Twist’. Twirling through the air and combining two riverbanks, The Twist is “a hybrid spanning several traditional categories: It’s a museum, it’s a bridge, it’s an inhabitable sculpture,” says Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner & Creative Director, BIG. Situated at the Kistefos Sculpture Park in Jevnaker, Norway, the project was first proposed in 2011 by the Bjarke Ingels Group and now in 2019, it is a striking reality.
Designer: Bjarke Ingels Group
Visitors can walk across The Twist to complete their entire tour of the sculptural park, while also admiring it for the independent, one of a kind attraction it is. Bjarke Ingels said in a press release, “As a bridge it [The Twist] reconfigures the sculpture park turning the journey through the park into a continuous loop. As a museum, it connects two distinct spaces—an introverted vertical gallery and an extraverted horizontal gallery with panoramic views across the river. A third space is created through the blatant translation between these two galleries creating the namesake twist.”
With entries at both sides of the bridge, it provides endless possibilities of exploration. The varied types of daylight entering through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows create three distinctive galleries with diverse aesthetics. On the northern side, you have a naturally lit, open-spaced and breathy gallery with panoramic views of the beautiful landscape and the sculptural park. At the southern end, you enter a long, dimly-lit gallery, accessorized with artificial lighting. And in the middle, you have a sculptural space created out of straight aluminum panels, arranged ‘like a stack of books’, the reason behind the structure’s given name.
“The Twist has been an extremely complex building to construct, yet the result is simple and striking,” says David Zahle, a partner at BIG. “From an array of straight elements, the museum was constructed in an industrial manner as both a piece of infrastructure and as a building reflecting its natural surroundings. As you approach The Twist, you start to notice the museum reflecting the trees, the hills, and the water below, constantly glimmering and changing its appearance in dialogue with nature.”
Kistefos Sculpture Park showcases a variety of tremendous site-specific works by artists such as Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Fernando Botero and etc. The Twist, serving as a natural extension to the park, only adds on to the thriving artistic collection that is already present there. Possessing a futuristic, otherworldly appeal, and spiraling like a deck of cards in the air, The Twist ‘twists’ into an impossible form, providing exquisite views of the park, while being a sight to see in itself.
