The former U.S. Embassy building in central Oslo has undergone a beautiful restoration and is now a stunning multi-use venue. Paul Milligan reports.
One consequence of the 9/11 terrorist attack on New York in 2001 was the U.S. Government’s subsequent decision to sell off many of its city centre embassies around the world, to move to larger, more secure buildings in less central locations. With many of these embassies shining architectural examples of postwar modernism, it left people questioning what was going to happen to them. In truth some of the embassies had become shadows of their former selves.
Post-9/11 many of the embassies were covered in fences with ugly looking bollards installed around the perimeter to keep people out, which was the opposite intention of the U.S. Embassy in Oslo when it was built in 1959. It was conceived as a cultural house open to all, and had a public library in which more than 6,000 Norwegians held library cards and borrowed books and LPs from the United States Information Service.
Credit for all pix: Oda Hveem
It had an auditorium for film screenings, an exhibition hall, and a canteen for office workers open to the public. Designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen (who also designed the Gateway Arch in St. Louis) to resemble a Renaissance palace, the embassy became a signature building in Oslo, because of its shape and design. It was built in the shape of an isosceles triangle, and features 577 recessed white windows.
After the US embassy moved to a new location in 2017, the building was by bought for $44m by Norwegian property developer Fredensborg, owned by Ivar Tollefsen, one of Norway’s richest individuals. Architecture practice Atelier Oslo worked alongside another Oslo-based firm, LundHagem, on the building’s restoration and extension. What stands on the site now is a completely renovated building which includes a modern office with 400 workstations, meeting rooms and conference facilities, dining areas with restaurants, a rooftop bar, café and kitchen areas, and modern gym. Tasked with handling all the AV inside this new iteration of the embassy was Norwegian systems integrator Bravo.
The integrator had worked on a similar landmark project on the exact same road as the embassy, when it renovated The Sommerro (CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL CASE STUDY) Hotel. You would think with such familiarity with the location it was a mere formality that Bravo was given the job, but the truth is slightly more complicated explains CEO Mikael Osen. “The client did have a relationship with another AV company, and they were involved in the early stages. We were invited for lunch with the client during ISE 2022 in Barcelona, and we had a conversation about Sommerro, and they found out that our approach was closer to what they wanted. There really wasn’t a tender, it was just the conversation where we talked about how we use technology to elevate the experience of a building.”
The previous AV supplier had already begun some of the planning, when Bravo was eventually given the AV contract. Osen got quite the shock when he first got to site, “When we got the contract, they had already dug out the cellar, so the entire building was standing on pillars. When you walked in the building you just saw 50 metres down into a big hole.” The excavation process, which involved very close supervision from the local authorities and took 18 months, saw the entire structure put on stilts while 16,000 cubic meters of rock was removed to make room for a conference area, gym, parking garage and Oslo’s largest wine cellar.
The process to return the embassy to its former glory was tricky, time-consuming and detailed, for example all 577 windows (including 64,000 screws) were removed, cleaned and reinserted during the restoration process. Eighty per cent of the interiors are new but have been carefully reconstructed from historical records from that period. “There are original listed interior elements that we had to take care of,” says Osen. “It was a total renovation, they kept everything they could, but it was in a really, really bad shape. They tried to keep the original kind of look and feel. It looks very much like a Mad Men set (a TV show set in the early 1960s).”
What did the client ask Bravo to provide in those first few meetings on this project? “They wanted to have a fully functional office space, that was the first point. Even though they wanted to have the look and feel of the 1960s, they wanted to have modern use cases in the meeting spaces.” On the ground floor there is a full meeting space for 50 people, as well as smaller meeting areas and spaces. “But you also have restaurants and a lot of different elements, so they really wanted to have technology that could take them from 7:00am throughout the working day but also work during the evening for dinners, so pretty much a 24/7 operational setting. And they didn’t want to see the technology at all,” adds Osen. Despite the 1960s architecture taking the lead in this restoration project you’ll still find technology everywhere you look says Osen. “From the event areas downstairs all the way up to the roof, it’s AV all the way.”
One of the most important AV elements for the client says Osen, at least from the owner Ivar Tollefsen and his son Nick’s perspectives, was the audio. “They are sound buffs and wanted to have the top of the line feeling when it came to how the sound experience works, that was the centre of everything we talked about throughout the project really.”
Working from the top down, the embassy has a rooftop bar and restaurant with 360-degree views over Oslo. To keep things hidden as requested, Bravo has installed K-array speakers into the plant beds around the outer edge and has hidden speakers along the three sides of the roof of the entire building. The fourth floor, which was previously home to the ambassador’s office, is now office space, along with the third floor, for use by Fredensborg as its new head office. The second floor, previously home to the public library, is now the headquarters for the Norwegian branch of Amnesty International and children’s charity SOS Children’s Villages. Ivar Tollefsen has granted both a free 10-year office lease.
The first floor, previously the former auditorium and staff restaurant now houses two restaurants and a bakery. The 14-metre deep basement is home to a large conference space that can accommodate 1,000 people, as well as a brand new gym and parking area.
AV control throughout the building is handled via the Q-Sys platform. Flexibility was a key requirement from the client on this project, which can make it a tough job for the integrator involved. “It’s difficult, especially when they want ease of use and to have it as flexible as humanly possible too, so that anyone can go in and make something work immediately,” explains Osen.
“All of these scenarios need to be pre-programmed, so they have one button to push and that’s it. It’s quite demanding when it comes to the programming, you have to talk through all the different scenarios. You might not even know what kind of scenarios they typically have, you just have to workshop all of them.” Does the client want the spaces to perform differently from Monday to Friday to the weekend or from day to night? “Yes, especially on the ground floor and the event halls. The office spaces in the 3rd and 4th floors are quite similar all the time, but the ground floor is very dependent on the time of day. We’ve curated the music especially to accommodate for different usage during the time of day.”
What were the most difficult parts of the installation for Bravo? “In complex installations such as this, it’s always difficult with time management, and delivery issues (caused by the supply chain crisis) made it quite difficult, that was the main hurdle to get over,” says Osen. Providing as much flexibility as was possible, which was asked for by the client, also provided a big challenge. Experience, especially in a similar project, really helped here he adds. “In The Sommerro project we learned a lot about working with all the different stakeholders when it comes to the listed elements of the building, so it was not as big of an issue this time around.”
How did Bravo make the choices it did with regards to technology for this project? “From an audio point of view, we opted for the same as we did on Sommerro with K-Array,” explains Osen. The initial AV company involved had specified the entire project with another audio brand, “but it was more expensive and stood out a little bit more when it came to hiding the audio. We spoke to the owner and said it’s both possible to keep the same quality of audio but we can hide it a lot more and we can bring the price point down a bit as well.” Bravo has installed a mix of Lyzard and Anaconda units from K-array, because of the mix of power to size ratio they offer, to meet the client’s demands for ‘hidden audio’. To help with this, Bravo has also put subwoofers either under the under the screens or under the tables in meeting rooms. All the audio is running via Dante to give flexibility when it comes to distribution of sound.
There are more than 40 meeting rooms spaced dotted around the embassy, with a mix of small (one to two people) huddle rooms, and other “small retro and cool looking pods.” The smaller meeting rooms have BYOD setups in them, and the larger rooms have Lenovo touch panels with full Microsoft Teams accessibility. The meetings rooms feature a mix of 55-in and 75-in Samsung displays, 65-in Neat Boards, Netgear switchers and Huddly cameras. Other meeting spaces feature Absen LED videowalls, Zeta booking room panels, Lenovo tablets,
and Aurora encoders. Why did Bravo opt for Neat over other collaboration products? “The client really liked it, as they had a few demos on the show floor at ISE and tried a few different things. We installed a few pilot rooms for collaboration in the previous office of Fredensborg, so they were able to test different types of products. They liked the Neat platform, both from a look and feel aspect but also the ease of use too.”
Was Bravo able to test the kit off-site, or did it have to do it all on the site itself? “On the collaboration side of things, we did pilot rooms in the previous office for Fredensborg, they got employees to test different possibilities and different scenarios,” explains Osen. For the audio Bravo employed 3D techniques: “They got to hear how we designed it in the different spaces by using headphones and combining 3D visualisation.” How was Bravo able to get the buy-in from the on-site team as to what it was doing at the embassy? “Unlike the Sommerro project, where we had to deliver our services into the network they operated, this time around we delivered the network as well. We had two separate networks. It’s not separate VLANs, but two physical separate networks. We have a separate network for the AV.”
Moving forward Bravo will run the AV on the site remotely and will have on-site personnel when events are being run. Because Bravo ran through a host of different scenarios when it hosted the pilot rooms it hasn’t had to supply too much training to the site, apart from sessions to service people working in the restaurants and in the gym. “We have done some training there to ensure that they can switch music sources, but it’s so intuitive if you’re used to the Spotify interface it’s easy to use,” says Osen.
KIT LIST
Audio
Biamp Tesira expander, DAN-1 networking card, Desono loudspeakers, Parle ceiling mics
Bluesound BSO-B400S media player
K-array KA14, KA28, KA34, KA104, KU44, KU212, KU315 amplifiers, KU210 subwoofers, Python-KP102 line arrays, Vyper-KV102, GH4, Domino-KF26 loudspeakers
Sennheiser EW-DX SKM mics
Video
Absen 1.2mm LED tiles
Avonic AV-CM70-IP-B PTZ cameras
Epson PU2010B, EB-PU2113W projectors
Huddly IQ cameras
Neat Board 65-in
Samsung 55-in, 75-in, 85-in, 98-in displays
Control & Distribution
Aurora AUR-VPX-TC1-PRO encoders
Netgear GS308EP, GSM4230PX, GSM4248PX switches
Q-Sys touchpanels, Core Nano processors