Museum of the Viking Age
In Oslo, the Museum of the Viking Age brings together three 1,000 year old ships, thousands of artifacts, and a building-scale media environment into one coherent narrative of travel, belief, craft, and power. Across galleries, soundscapes, projections, and interactives, visitors encounter Vikings as a complex seafaring culture in constant motion.
Tamschick Media + Space, together with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, leads the overall exhibition design, shaping how visitors move, listen, and learn across the entire museum.
A Voyage
The Museum of the Viking Age is conceived as a continuous journey: from land to sea, from myth to craft, from individual stories to wider networks of trade and conflict. Architecture, light, sound, and media are treated as one integrated language.
Large-scale projections, interactive tables, Pepper’s Ghost illusions, tactile wall projections, and dozens of focused media stations are distributed as “moments of activation” along the visitor path. Each intervention is designed to clarify a specific question: "who travelled? how were ships built? what did belief systems look like?", while leaving space for the original objects to dominate.
An immersive soundscape threads through the museum, modulating between galleries to connect themes and time periods. Media and interactives are tuned to different depths, from quick, intuitive interactions for casual visitors to more detailed content for school groups and history enthusiasts.
From Ship Relics to Living Stories
Visitors move from the first encounter with the ships into a widening world of Viking life. Close viewing zones let them study construction details and traces of use, while media stations unpack navigation, trade routes, and everyday life on board and on land.
Interactive games and touch tables invite young visitors to experiment with choices and consequences while more contemplative spaces slow the pace around key artifacts. Selected historical moments are re-staged in a restrained, atmospheric way, allowing visitors to feel presence.
Across the entire visit, the ambient sound design ties galleries together into one long voyage: winds, creaking hulls, voices, and composed musical layers shift as visitors move, making time and distance perceptible.
Connecting centuries
The task was to redesign a national icon of Norwegian heritage into a museum for the 21st century. Three extremely fragile Viking ships and thousands of grave goods had to be reinterpreted for new generations without losing their aura or overloading them with digital layers.
The exhibition needed to balance scholarship and spectacle, work for local families and international tourists, and connect specialized archaeological knowledge with intuitive, emotional storytelling. From first arrival to final gallery, the museum had to feel like one coherent voyage rather than a series of disconnected displays.
The Museum of the Viking Age reframes a classic national collection for a global public. By integrating media carefully into a whole-building strategy, it turns fragile archaeological icons into the core of a contemporary narrative about travel, identity, technology, and environment.
The museum is expected to become one of Oslo’s most visited cultural destinations, with projections of up to one million visitors per year once it opens in mid-2027, positioning it as a major reference point for Viking history worldwide.
Project Highlights
- World’s largest museum dedicated to the Viking Age
- Three original Viking ships staged within a building-scale narrative
- Immersive soundscape running continuously from entrance to exit
- Comprehensive suite of media with projections, Pepper’s Ghost, interactives, tactile walls, and tabletop experiences
Facts & Figures
Design Partner: Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA)
Architect: AART Architects
