yblokka.no website (2020)

The yblokka.no website, designed by Mandag Studio, is an in-depth documentation of the fight to stop the demolishing of the architect Erling Viksjø’s ‘gesamtkunstwerk’. The Y-blokka building and its surrounding Norwegian government quarters were the target of the 2011 Oslo terror bombing. The Y-building was scheduled for demolition in 2014, against vocal opposition from leading architects and the Directorate for Cultural Heritage.

The website catalogues art projects, photography, documentaries, debates, press coverage and official documents produced throughout the process, from construction in 1959 until Y-blokka was finally demolished in 2020.

The Viksjø typeface was designed by Frode Helland of Monokrom Skriftforlag in response to the demolition threat. Starting with the floor plan of the building, the design expands outwards according to the principles of Brutalist architecture coined by the architectural critic Reyner Banham in his 1955 essay (and later book) “The New Brutalists”.

Viksjø is combined with Neue Haas Grotesk. It replaces Folio, which, alongside Viksjø and Pablo Picasso’s facade drawings reinterpreted through the pen of artist Ane Barstad Solvang, has been used in various other graphics for the campaign to save the Y-block.