Halfway through, the wall suddenly turns into the ceiling! Norway’s The Twist twists a museum into a bridge
A 60-meter span over the river, with its center rotated 90 degrees
Summary
-The Twist is located in Norway’s Kistefos Sculpture Park and was designed by BIG. The 1,000㎡ structure spans the Randselva river with a 60-meter-long bridge. -The center of the building twists 90 degrees, so the vertical exhibition space at one end gradually turns into the horizontal Panorama Gallery at the other, facing the river view. -The Twist is at once an art museum, the park’s second bridge, and a large-scale sculpture, transforming the original U-shaped visitor route into a complete circular loop.
Walk in and you’re in a museum; walk out and you’ve crossed a river.
Hidden in the forests of Jevnaker, Norway, The Twist looks as if someone grabbed a long white rectangular building and twisted it 90 degrees right through the middle.
Designed by Danish architecture firm BIG, it spans the Randselva River for about 60 meters. Most interestingly, it doesn’t choose between being a bridge and a museum; it truly combines both functions in a single building.
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The park needed a bridge, so BIG simply put a museum on top of it.
IMAGES FROM/THE TWIST
Kistefos Sculpture Park had been expanding along both sides of the river, leaving visitors with a somewhat inconvenient U-shaped route.
The park needed a new Contemporary Art Gallery as well as a second bridge to reconnect the two riverbanks. BIG’s answer was straightforward: rather than build two structures, let one building do both.
The roughly 1,000 m² The Twist was built directly over the river. Visitors can view the exhibition as they cross the river, and by the time they exit at the other end, they’ve completed the Sculpture Park’s loop.
At the center, the walls really do gradually become the ceiling.
IMAGES FROM/THE TWIST
The name “The Twist” isn’t a metaphor.
At the building’s south end is the more vertical, inward-facing Closed Gallery. As you move north, the entire rectangular space gradually rotates; by the time you reach the central Twist Gallery, the former walls have become the floor and ceiling.
The rotation continues through 90 degrees, ending at the horizontally oriented Panorama Gallery on the north side. Expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass look out onto the river and forest, making the natural landscape part of the exhibition space.
It looks like it’s all curves, yet there isn’t a single curve.
IMAGES FROM/THE TWIST
The Twist also conceals a beautiful visual illusion.
From the outside, its white exterior appears to twist like soft fabric, yet Kistefos says the entire building is made entirely of straight lines.
Long strips of aluminum and wood gradually shift in angle like a shuffled deck of cards, eventually forming a fan-shaped surface that makes the eye perceive continuous curves.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Twist isn’t that it’s a strange-looking building, but that it truly blurs the boundaries between bridge, museum, landscape, and sculpture. You may have only meant to get to the other side of the river, then find yourself completing an exhibition without realizing it.
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