Lambda Files

This exhibition documents the twelve years of work that Estudio Herreros dedicated to the Munch Museum project in Oslo. The exhibition is carried out in cooperation with CentroCentro in Madrid and arc en rêve in Bordeaux and coincides with the opening of the museum in October 2021.

The name of the exhibition, Lambda Files, was taken from the pseudonym that protected the architects’ anonymity in the international competition and was surprisingly also used by the media until construction of the building began. The files are a large collection of materials documenting the internal history of the project and are of the type that normally never see the light of day. Most firms of architects consider them to be “paperwork” and even redraw the plans for clean publications that deproblematize the design work.

At a time when most museums are rethinking their assignments and their significance for the public, we thought it was necessary to consider a radically different case: that of a museum built from scratch, a cityscape that changes with the emergence of a new architectural element, a cultural facility that takes its meaning from individual and collective uses.

Thus, Lambda Files. The Munch Museum Project in Oslo shows how new ways of doing architecture are the result of intense political and social dialogue, of long-term collaborations between a variety of agents. Among the numerous documents, the exhibition presents for the first time the images taken of the building by the architectural photographer Iwan Baan, which show it from a perspective that is not fetishist or objectual but situated and unexpectedly useful.

The exhibition is completed with a set of dialogues in which major international experts will discuss the paradigms that renew the language of architecture and the way of experiencing cities today.