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Architects want to save tower bombed by Breivik

Richard Orange
Richard Orange - [email protected]
Architects want to save tower bombed by Breivik
Norway's government buildings with Picasso mural - Alexander Ottesen

Eight out of ten architects in Norway want to keep the concrete government tower damaged by Norway terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, citing its Picasso-designed murals and brutalist design, a survey for NRK has revealed.

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"H-block is worth a lot to many people,"  Kjersti Nerseth, past president of the National Association of Norwegian Architects, told the channel. "It is an important building on infinitely many levels. Not least because of the symbolism that someone wanted to tear it down." 
 
In the survey, 84 percent of architects wanted to preserve the high-rise H block, 65.7 percent wanted to preserve both H-block and the next door Y-block, while just 8.7 percent wanted to tear them both down.
 
In late June, a government committee recommended demolishing both buildings, citing the cost of repairing and maintaining buildings from the 1950s. 
 
Audun Engh, director of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU), complained that the professional architects' romance with modernist buildings was not shared by the rest of the public. 
 
"Unfortunately, there is a nostalgia among today's architects for the modernist ideology, which not to be influenced by what other people think," he said. 
 
The buildings were damaged when far-right terrorist Anders Breivik detonated a car bomb underneath the tower. 

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