B R A I N S T O R M

Nye Deichmanske hovedbibliothek, Oslo 2020

In 2016, Studio Ramberg won the international competition for a permanent artwork for Oslo’s new main library, Deichman Bjørvika. The commission was to create a work that would give the building a distinct identity and reflect the library’s role as an arena for knowledge. Studio Ramberg chose to return to the origins – to the infancy of the public library – to pose the question: What is Enlightenment – today?

Deichman was founded in 1785 on the basis of Carl Deichman’s bequest of more than 6,000 books. The library was open to all citizens – a radical step in an age shaped by the Enlightenment’s ideals of equal access to knowledge. Only a year earlier, Immanuel Kant had published his famous essay Was ist Aufklärung?, in which he quoted the Roman poet Horace’s motto Sapere aude – “dare to know.” In the eighteenth century, this was a bold call: granting knowledge to broad segments of the population could challenge the ruling elite and, in the worst case, lead to revolution. The daring lay in breaking the monopoly on knowledge.

The working title of the art project was From daring to sharing – a concept grounded in the library’s evolution: from the vertical “dare to know” of the Enlightenment to today’s horizontal and digital sharing culture. From the struggle for access to knowledge to the immediate, global flow of information in our time, driven by social media and digital technology. This working title was intended to define a process, not a static object – a movement mirroring the library’s development over more than two centuries.

The artwork BRAINSTORM comprises 420 metres of mouth-blown glass tubes filled with the noble gas neon, formed into a chaotic, luminous structure – like a brain. In the Enlightenment, light was the central metaphor for intelligence and understanding; today it is also a tangible technological medium. All digital communication – from e-mails and messages to streamed content – is transmitted as light through fibre-optic cables, at the speed of light. On a microscopic level, the human brain functions in a similar way: electrical impulses – tiny flashes of light – connect synapses that store experiences and thoughts.

The title BRAINSTORM underscores the importance of community: brainstorming cannot take place alone – and it must be free from censorship. The work can be read as the city’s collective brain, where the library is not merely a repository of books but a living network of people, ideas, and exchange. It points towards one of the great challenges of the twenty-first century: to think together, to interact, to socialise, and to democratise knowledge. Artificial intelligence, too, is at heart a synthesis of earlier thoughts, stored in “big data” and shared globally – ideally in a democratic and non-hierarchical manner.

In 2021, Deichman Bjørvika was named the world’s best new public library by the IFLA – the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.