The Twist Museum by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) opens in Norway, bridging art and nature across the Randselva River, in the Kistefos Sculpture Park of Jevnaker Municipality. The project was the winning entry in the competition by Kistefos Museum. 

Traversing the winding Randselva, The Twist is an inhabitable bridge torqued at its center, forming a new journey and art piece within the Kistefos Sculpture Park in Jevnaker, Norway. 

Kistefos’ new 1,000-square-metre contemporary art institution doubles as infrastructure to connect two forested riverbanks, completing the cultural route through northern Europe’s largest sculpture park. 

The Twist was inaugurated with Her Majesty Queen Sonja, His Royal Highness Crown Prince of Denmark Frederik, Prime Minster of Norway Erna Solberg, and Ministers Siv Jensen and Trine Skei Grande in attendance.

Built around a historical pulp mill, The Twist is conceived as a beam warped 90 degrees near the middle to create a sculptural form as it spans the Randselva. Visitors roaming the park’s site-specific works by international artists such as Anish Kapoor, Olafur Eliasson, Lynda Benglis Yayoi Kusama, Jeppe Hein, and Fernando Botero, among others, cross The Twist to complete the art tour. 

As a second bridge and natural extension to the park, the new museum transforms the visitor experience while doubling Kistefos’ indoor exhibition space. A simple twist in the building’s volume allows the bridge to lift from the lower, forested riverbank in the south up to the hillside area in the north.

As a continuous path in the landscape, both sides of the building serve as the main entrance. From the south entry, visitors cross a 16m aluminum-clad steel bridge to reach the double-height space with a clear view to the north end, similarly linked with a 9m pedestrian bridge.

The double-curved geometry of the museum is comprised of straight 40cm wide aluminum panels arranged like a stack of books, shifted ever so slightly in a fanning motion. The same principle is used inside with white painted 8cm wide fir slats cladding the floor, wall, and ceiling as one uniform backdrop for Kistefos’ short-term Norwegian and international exhibitions. From either direction, visitors experience the twisted gallery as though walking through a camera shutter.

“The Twist is a hybrid", says Bjarke Ingels, Founding Partner and Creative Director at BIG, "spanning several traditional categories: it’s a museum, it’s a bridge, it’s an inhabitable sculpture. As a bridge it 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. The resultant form becomes another sculpture among the sculptures of the park," says Bjarke Ingles.

"The Twist represents a new challenge for the exhibiting artists and artworks to engage with, and I am particularly excited to see how the work of two artists – Hodgkin and Creed, a visual artist and a performance artist – has turned this spatial problem into a great potential!," says Bjarke Ingels.

Images © Laurian Ghinitoiu

Models and drawings © BIG

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