"The new opera house doesn’t look like any ordinary building. Camouflaged beneath its sloping surfaces, it is more like part of the landscape. Even if the opera house design underwent various changes in the course of its development, the basic ideas from the competition stage were retained. The Bjørvika peninsula belongs to the harbour, which forms a real and symbolic transition between land and sea. In the design, this threshold was given the form of a great wall or “wave wall”, where Norway and the world, art and everyday life come together. The production areas in the opera house – workshops and administration – are conceived as a self-contained, independent, rationally planned “factory”. This realm was to be both functional and flexible during the planning stage and in later use. The building is divided into two halves by a north-south corridor, the “opera street”. To the west of this are all public and stage areas; to the east are the administration and workshops, which are much simpler in their form and execution."