Norway's Scenic Routes: Where a Road Trip Becomes an Architecture Tour

Six hundred and fifty metres above the Aurlandsfjord, a timber walkway leaves the mountainside, runs out over the tops of the pine trees and stops. Where you expect a railing, there is a single sheet of glass. Beyond it, the fjord lies far below — a narrow blade of dark water pressed between mountains, with the village of Aurlandsvangen tucked against the shore.

This is Stegastein, and it was not put there by accident. It was commissioned by Norway's public roads authority and designed by architects — one of a long line of viewpoints, rest stops, bridges and shelters that have quietly turned the country's most dramatic roads into something close to an open-air architecture museum.

A roads agency that hires architects

Most countries treat a rest area as an afterthought: a car park, a bin, a toilet block. Norway took a different view. The National Tourist Routes programme, run by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (Statens vegvesen), began in the 1990s with a simple ambition — to draw travellers into rural Norway by pairing its landscapes with genuinely good design.

Today there are 18 designated routes, threading through fjords, mountain plateaus and Arctic coastline. Along them, the agency has commissioned a generation of Norwegian and international architects and artists to build the places where drivers stop. The brief is less about monuments than about framing: a platform that takes you a little closer to the edge, a path that slows you down, a shelter that makes the weather part of the experience.

The result is a road trip you can plan around buildings.

Stegastein: a plank over the Aurlandsfjord

Designed by Todd Saunders and Tommie Wilhelmsen and completed in 2006, Stegastein is one of the programme's best-known stops, and it earns the attention through restraint. The platform is essentially a single gesture: a 30-metre ribbon of laminated pine on a steel frame, four metres wide, that runs out from the road and hangs in the air.

Its genius is that it holds the view back until the very end. You walk between plain timber sides with the fjord only half revealed, and then the platform simply runs out. The glass at the tip keeps you safe without putting anything solid between you and the drop. Even the small service building has been nudged slightly over the cliff edge, so visitors get the view while the people inside keep their privacy.

Trollstigen: watching the road from above

If Stegastein is about stillness, Trollstigen is about motion. The Trollstigen road climbs a steep valley wall in a sequence of hairpin bends, and for a long time the main event was simply getting up it. Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekter won the competition to design the stop at the top in 2004, and the finished project opened in 2012.

Their answer was to let visitors look back at what they had just driven. A visitor centre and café sit on the plateau, with paths and steps leading out to a series of viewing platforms. The largest juts over a ledge to hover some 200 metres above the road as it snakes up the mountainside below. The platforms push out by degrees, so there is a comfortable spot for the cautious and a properly dizzying one for the bold.

Vøringsfossen: 99 steps over a waterfall

At Vøringsfossen, on the edge of the Hardangervidda plateau, a waterfall drops 182 metres into the Måbødalen valley. Architect Carl-Viggo Hølmebakk has spent years reworking the whole site, and in August 2020 its centrepiece opened: a stepped steel bridge that crosses the gorge in 99 steps over a span of 47 metres.

Hølmebakk has described the job in refreshingly practical terms — the bridge had to be safe and solid, connect with the old historic road and the surrounding landscape, and heighten the views rather than compete with them. Walking it, you feel all three at once. The steps make the crossing slow and deliberate, and the roar of the water does the rest.

Zumthor in the far north and the deep south

Some of the most affecting stops have nothing to do with fjords.

In Vardø, at the northern end of the Varanger route on the edge of the Barents Sea, the Steilneset Memorial commemorates the 91 people convicted of witchcraft and burnt at the stake in Finnmark in the 17th century. Swiss architect Peter Zumthor and artist Louise Bourgeois designed it together, and it opened in 2011. Zumthor's 100-metre memorial hall is a timber frame holding a fabric-sheathed corridor lit by 91 small windows, each with a single bulb and a plaque recording one person's story. Beside it, a smoked-glass pavilion houses Bourgeois's installation The Damned, The Possessed and The Beloved — her last major work.

Far to the south, on the Ryfylke route near Sauda, Zumthor returned for Allmannajuvet, a museum at a zinc mine that operated from 1881 to 1899. Opened in 2016, it is a cluster of small buildings raised on stilts in the gorge, telling the story of the mine with the same economy of means as the rock face around it.

Planning the trip

The routes are made for driving, and the joy of them is freedom: stop when the light is good, linger where the view asks you to. A few things make the difference:

• Go early or late. The best-known viewpoints are busiest in the middle of a summer day; mornings and evenings bring softer light and room on the platforms.
• Check the season. The structures are part of the landscape all year, but facilities at many stops — including the toilets at Stegastein and Trollstigen — only open in the warmer months.
• Leave time. These are places built to slow you down. Racing between them misses the point.

Not everyone wants to spend a holiday on mountain passes behind the wheel. If you'd rather pair the scenery with time on the water, fjord tours across Norway and the Nordic countries are a relaxed way to see the landscapes these viewpoints were built to frame. For a wider choice — guided hikes, city walks and fjord cruises out of Bergen and Oslo — browse NordExplore, a platform for tours and experiences across Northern Europe, and fit the architecture stops in around them.

Why a rest stop can be architecture

It would have been easy for Norway to leave these places alone and let the scenery speak for itself. What the National Tourist Routes show is that good architecture, placed at the right moment, does not compete with a landscape — it tunes you into it. A plank over a fjord, a staircase over a waterfall, a corridor of 91 lights at the top of the country: each one asks you to stop, look, and stay a little longer.

For more Norwegian buildings worth travelling for, from medieval stave churches to contemporary timber towers, explore our guide to architecture in Norway.

Photo: Erik den yngre, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).