Glacier time or et in Arcadia ego

That year, National Geographic declared Næroyfjord, an offshoot of the great Sognefjord, "the most beautiful place in the world". In fact, seen from our urban world, the whole site of that Sognefjord is another world.

A world of innocence and beginnings, mysterious in the heart of the Josstedal glacier, a world that still breathes beneath the enormous masses of ice and sets them in a perpetual, ponderous motion. A world of the patience with which the water has carved its way through the granite coasts of Norway. A world of stillness, of diffused light, of cool colors, of long lines of contact between water, mountain and sky, a world of non-urban life, rarefied like the air there.

At the end of another branch of the Sognefjord, called Fjærland, at one end of the world and also of a valley taken from the fjord, is a kind of stone block carved by the hand of Sverre Fehn. It stands like a joint between the horizontal water and the vertical mountain. It is here that our hurried time has also made its presence felt, through architecture, in nature's slow time. Sverre Fehn's architecture is there to regulate human time with the time of the glacier.

The Glacier Museum does not exhibit pieces recovered from a vanished world. It's a museum of a latent presence that may or may not be eternal. A few degrees less in the global temperature would turn it into an absence that would place our world beneath the ocean waters.

The bulk of the building has something of the movement of the glacier. Between the two staircases leading up to the terrace platform, the entrance spindle lies flat on the ground. It resembles the waterway of the ferry that brought us through the slopes. Everywhere, discreetly, the architecture celebrates the glacier: up the steps, from the terraces, from the cafeteria. The museum's administration does the same, but explicitly: through the 3D movie, the models, the sound of the moving ice rustling and crackling everywhere, the bus tour to the foot of the glacier.

I would have stayed there much longer. I had gotten to that hard-to-reach place by an undaunted will, at my own expense, with the help of friends and great good fortune. After a long journey through the mountains and on the water, at the change of direction in the middle of the Sogne Fjord, I had learned that the Fjærland Arm was only ferried on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was Wednesday. Then a deux ex machina appeared in the form of a group of Americans, for whom a ferry had been exceptionally made available. On the way, the guide told us about the glacier. As for the museum building and the architect - nothing more; the guide was more proud of the American president who had just visited the place.

We were just two architects and we could only enjoy as much as we were given. And it was not a little!