Images taken by Adrian Bugge featured in the book Y: The building that disappeared, published by Uten tittel.

The title says it all, Y: The building that disappeared. The Y in question is the Y-block, the bluntly Brutalist government building designed in the 1960s by the Norwegian architect, Erling Viksjø. Made from natural concrete cast with five million stones from a nearby riverbed and art made specially for the site by Carl Nesjar and Pablo Picasso, the Y-block became a much loved Oslo landmark only to be demolished last year despite a feisty campaign to save it.
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Some of those campaigners have celebrated the Y, and its neighbour, the Highrise, in Design Emergency’s Pick of the Week, a book that documents their destruction and the impact of such a loss on Oslo in a year of photographs taken by Adrian Bugge, starting on 2 March 2020, and in essays written by Osloites that miss it. The outcome is a poignant tribute to the Y-block and Highrise and a chilling warning of how the same fate could easily befall other beloved, but vulnerable modernist buildings.
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"When a building is around fifty years old, it reaches the most dangerous period in its life,” writes Ola H. Fjeldheim, secretary general of the National Trust of Norway. "The distance from the values embedded within it has grown long, it requires maintenance, and it has yet to become interesting in the eyes of the majority.” To Fjeldheim, the Y’s values were those of "a social democracy, of the struggle to build a modern society with opportunity for all”. The artist Hanne Ämli sees the river stones as "symbols of Norway’s population.” While the architect Bjarne Asp notes that he has changed his walking routes around Oslo to avoid spotting - and mourning - the place where the Y once stood.