Co-producted by La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona and CentroCentro in Madrid, the exhibition Lambda Files documents the twelve years of work that estudio Herreros has devoted to the project and to the construction of the Munch Museum of Oslo.
The name of the exhibition, Lambda Files, was taken from the pseudonym that protected the architects’ anonymity in the international competition and was surprisingly also used by the media until construction of the building began. Far removed from the typical display of architecture exhibitions, the files are here a large collection of materials documenting the internal history of the project. The latters are of the type that normally never see the light of day, since most offices consider them to be “paperwork” and even redraw the plans for clean publications removing any trace of the innumerable contingencies that accompany the design and the construction process.
At a time when most museums are rethinking their role and their tasks, the exhibition consider a radically different case: that of a museum built from scratch, of a cityscape that changes with the emergence of a new architectural element, of a cultural facility that takes its meaning from individual and collective uses.
Thus, Lambda Files shows how new ways of doing architecture can be the result of a political and social dialogue and of long-term collaborations between a variety of actors. Among the numerous documents, the exhibition presents for the first time the images taken by the architectural photographer Iwan Baan, which show it from a situated and unexpectedly useful perspective.
