#mie-bjrndal-ottestad

#mie-bjrndal-ottestad

Norwegians are a great lens to teach us about some healthy longevity practices. The Norwegian diet is a significant factor. It's been described as the cold-weather cousin to the Mediterranean diet.

Every one of these items takes up space and energy, but the use of energy here in relation to clutter is actually two-fold. The stuff you own requires maintenance and management, and when you pass, this management becomes shifted along to someone else (whoever is responsible for sorting through your Earthly possessions).

The building feels both austere and atmospheric, especially in the way light moves through the interior spaces and emphasizes the geometry of the structure. He's always seeking unique relationships between form, light, and atmosphere.

Excavations carried out in 2025 by the Arctic University Museum of Norway revealed that the artefacts came from a boat burial. The grave contained the skeleton of a woman placed inside a boat measuring about 5.5 metres in length. She had been buried together with a dog, suggesting the animal may have been an important companion in life.

Danish architecture studio Henning Larsen has been selected to redesign and expand Glyvra School in the Faroe Islands, proposing a landscape-driven educational campus that responds directly to the region's topography and climate. Conceived as a "learning village," the project rethinks the role of the school in a small coastal community, positioning architecture and outdoor space as integral parts of everyday learning.

In Bergen - one of Europe's rainiest cities - Copenhagen-based BIOSIS has completed Lagunen II, a climate-adaptive, community-focused expansion of Norway's largest shopping centre. The 15,000-square-meter extension redefines the role of the contemporary mall by transforming it into an open, light-filled urban environment shaped directly by the coastal climate and the daily rhythms of its surrounding neighborhood.

Alvim Kindergarten is located in the Alvim district of Sarpsborg, Norway a neighborhood characterized by social challenges, with many low-income families and limited childcare options. The project consists of a two-storey extension and remodeling of the existing 1970s building. Despite tight budgets and a compressed schedule, the kindergarten was completed in just one year, from site acquisition to opening day, in time for the start of the school year.

A week's hiking in Jotunheimen national park (230 miles north of Oslo) last summer brought me tranquillity and peace. During four days of challenging hiking and wild camping through the area we saw hardly anyone else, having entire lush green valleys and still glacial lakes to ourselves. We were fortunate to have stunning weather throughout and, despite it being July, still had a reasonable amount of snow to traverse.

Archaeologists working beside the ruins of Selja Monastery - a major medieval pilgrimage site on the island of Selja, off Norway's western coast - have uncovered the remains of a previously undocumented stone structure just metres from the monastic complex. The discovery, made within the first days of a new research excavation, could add a fresh chapter to what scholars know about daily life and activity on the island during the monastic period.

Having settled on where to ski in Norway, I found myself packing up the Kvikk Lunsj wafers and sweet brown brunost cheese sandwiches at the glassy Juvet Landscape Hotel, deep in the Sunnmøre Alps. Then the slow ascent, with skins on our splitboard skis, up to the peak at Mefjellet: torturous in some ways, looking at all that glinting Care Bear snow all the way up, but also a deliciously tantric act of meditation and delayed gratification.

A gold ring with a deep-blue, oval setting - decorated with fine spirals of filigree and tiny granulated beads - has been recovered from medieval deposits in Tønsberg, a historic town in southeastern Norway. The ring was found during an excavation in the modern town centre, where archaeologists have been investigating layers of urban life preserved beneath today's streets. The discovery was made within the protected archaeological area known as Tønsberg Medieval Town.

Greenland is currently making headlines, much to the chagrin of Greenlanders. U.S. President Donald Trump's ambition to seize this island, an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO founding member, has turned global attention to a corner of the planet they probably hadn't considered before, or to Wikipedia or AI tools, to find out who lives on that enormous white patch in a corner of the American continent, and how.