Roadside Attractions: 'Detour' Exhibit

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PULL IN AT any designated scenic overlook in this country, and if there are facilities, they probably stink like summer camp and look like Siberian prison toilets.

It needn't be this way. As showcased in "Detour: Architecture and Design Along 18 National Tourist Routes in Norway," an exhibition at the National Building Museum, structures that frame the public's experience of nature can themselves be inspirational.

Architecture shows are always dependent on video (shipping fees being a real bear), and the most ingenious part of the "Detour" installation is an early 1900s-style viewing enclosure that screens footage of completed projects. Visitors peer into brass openings to see bridges, platforms and bird-watching blinds in use. Below the screen runs a sculpted map of Norway outfitted with LEDs that light up to indicate where each project is sited.

Scenic tourism isn't about letting the eye roam absently over natural wonders; it's about uniting a culture through shared recognition of its landmarks. So it is that Carl-Viggo Holmebakk's viewing platform at Sohlbergplassen offers up the vista captured in Harald Sohlberg's famed 1914 painting "Winter Night in Rondane." For a viewing station at Nedre Oscarshaug, Holmebakk has placed a so-called telescope on a turntable that aligns the device's twin planes of glass with the names the surrounding mountains.

Not all of the designs are so conceptual. Landskapfabrikken designed a triangular berm for Finnbyen. Its main purpose is to protect the road and several buildings along the coast from rock slides, but it's also something of an earthwork.

In all these projects, it's not simply a matter of where you are, it's how you look at it.

» National Building Museum, 401 F St. NW; through May 25, free; 202-272-2448. (Judiciary Square)

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photo courtesy National Tourist Routes Project