Storting Building

The Storting Building, seat of the Storting, Norway's national parliament, stands in central Oslo, completed in 1866 to a design by the Swedish architect Emil Victor Langlet, chosen through a design competition after an earlier planned design was abandoned. Its semicircular main chamber and curved yellow-brick facade, along with a distinctive pairing of a taller cylindrical tower and a shorter rectangular one, give the building an asymmetrical profile that departed from the strict symmetry common to other European legislative buildings of the period. Langlet drew on Italian Romanesque and French Renaissance architectural references for the building's exterior, a deliberately eclectic historicist approach typical of major European civic buildings constructed in the mid-nineteenth century. The building has been expanded and renovated several times since its completion to accommodate the growth of Norway's parliamentary institutions, while its historic core and facade have been preserved largely intact, and it remains one of the oldest purpose-built parliament buildings in the Nordic countries.