On Christmas Eve 1909, the people of Kristiania looked up. Eight hundred incandescent bulbs had just been switched on atop the Thune building at the corner of Karl Johans gate and Øvre Slottsgate, spelling out the word "Freia" in light visible the length of the royal boulevard. Norway had seen nothing like it. This was the country's first electric advertising sign — and it happened to be aimed directly at the Parliament building, with the Royal Palace straight ahead in the distance.
The story goes that Theodore Roosevelt, visiting Oslo in May 1910 to belatedly deliver his Nobel Peace Prize lecture at the Nationaltheatret, was so taken with the illuminated sign that he spoke of it to the press when he returned home, saying that what impressed him most was this commercial sign.
Whether or not the quote is precisely as Freia's marketing has long preserved it — that he found their light display more impressive than anything else in Norway — the anecdote says something true about the sign. It had that kind of presence. It still does.
The clock itself
The construction that carries Freiaklokken covers 140 square metres of the Thune building's facade and weighs eight tonnes, supported by beams that reach all the way down into the basement. The building takes its name from Nilius Martinius Thune, the goldsmith who bought the property in 1861 and established what became one of Norway's most distinguished jewellery and watchmaking firms — a certain irony, given that the building is now most famous for telling time on behalf of a chocolate company.
The clock has been dark only twice. The first time was during the German occupation in the Second World War. The second was in 2012, when the entire structure underwent a full rehabilitation. Both times, the moment it was switched back on drew people into the street.
When Oslo's mayor Fabian Stang threw the switch in October 2012, crowds gathered on Karl Johan for hot cocoa and chocolate distributed by Freia. The rebuilt clock now uses more than ten thousand individually controlled LED diodes and consumes eighty per cent less electricity than the old version.
The Freiaklokken is only the most visible chapter in a long history of Freia knowing how to put itself in front of people. The chocolate company was an early adopter of almost every new medium of the twentieth century — and some that were not strictly media at all.
Read more about Freia's marketing gist
In 1911, Freia's "chocolate boys" began selling confections from silver trays between the seats at Nationaltheatret and at Circus Verdensteateret, Norway's grandest cinema of the day. A partnership with Oslo Kinematografer, the city's cinema operator, has continued ever since. In 1923, the company commissioned Ottar Gladtvet to make what was probably Norway's first industrial film, a silent picture showing how chocolate is manufactured. Four years later, the first Freia advertising film was made specifically for the opening of Ullevål Stadion. In 1927, Freia had already understood that the opening of a major sports venue was a media moment worth being part of.
The company also took to the air. In 1914, a plane trailing a banner for Meda milk chocolate over Kristiania crashed into Frognerkilen — an accident that, predictably, generated far more attention than the campaign would have achieved had it gone smoothly. In 1920, a Freia aircraft flew the length of the coast from Oslo to Trondheim, scattering two to three million promotional leaflets over towns and countryside. A decade before the age of mass radio, Freia was thinking like a broadcast company.
The wall paintings came from a simpler insight: that the construction boom of the 1890s had covered the city in large, bare gable ends. Freia began commissioning murals to fill them, at their own expense, turning advertising into something a little closer to public art. The tradition survived the war, and a version of it continues today. When the original "Freia wall" on Alexander Kiellands plass was lost to new construction, a new mural went up on Schous Plass, a collaboration between the Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo and Mondelēz International, depicting cows in urban surroundings across a hundred and thirty square metres of brickwork.
The "chocolate boy" — the Sjokoladegutten mascot introduced in 1930, a small figure in an oversized red suit with a flower in his buttonhole — was modelled on Jackie Coogan, the child actor known as "The Kid" in the Charlie Chaplin films. The figure was drawn by a Danish illustrator named Rødler at Thoen litografiske. It remains one of the most recognisable commercial images in Norwegian history.
Horngården: the building that was going to be taller
The building that now dominates Egertorget from the west side — the one with the long horizontal window bands and the clean, unornamented concrete lines — is not quite the building its architect intended. Lars Backer designed it in 1928 as a twelve-storey tower, or by some accounts thirteen, with rounded corners and far more glass than he was ultimately permitted to use. The city planning authority refused the height dispensation. Eight storeys were allowed.
The building went up anyway, and became the tallest in Oslo.
Backer did not see it finished. He died in June 1930 from a streptococcal infection, aged thirty-eight, and his colleague Frithjof Stoud Platou completed the work. Horngården was awarded the Sundts award that same year and is now a listed building — perhaps the most celebrated example of Norwegian functionalist architecture.
Its tenant on the ground floor was H. Horn & Co., a men's outfitter; the second floor housed first the Ritz konditori and tearoom, then from 1939 the Floris konditori, which remained until 1969.
Functionalism
Backer deserves to be known beyond specialist circles, because his career — short as it was — changed what Oslo looked like. His Restaurant Skansen on Kontraskjæret, completed in 1927, was not only Norway's first functionalist building but one of the earliest in all of Scandinavia.
The structure was elongated and pale yellow, shaped almost like an airship gondola, with a half-cylindrical entrance facade and a terrace for outdoor dining overlooking Pipervika and the fjord. It could seat two thousand people on the terrace in summer. It was, by any measure, extraordinary.
The Riksantikvar's successor office has since acknowledged that it would have listed Skansen had it survived.
It was demolished in 1970. The demolition was carried out with the explicit blessing of the Riksantikvar — the national heritage authority — on the grounds that the building was too close to Akershus fortress and disturbed its setting. No other building was planned for the site. No other building has gone up there since. The irony that the body responsible for protecting Norway's built heritage endorsed the destruction of one of its finest twentieth-century buildings is one that Norwegian architectural historians have not been able to let go of, and rightly so. The Riksantikvar's successor office has since acknowledged that it would have listed Skansen had it survived.
Ekebergrestauranten, which Backer also designed and which was completed in 1929, still stands. Horngården still stands. His gravestone at Vestre gravlund bears a relief of Restaurant Skansen. It is the building he is remembered by, even in death — the one that no longer exists.
Baker's bread and a name that stuck
Cross to the east side of Egertorget and the story changes register, becoming something more domestic. The square itself — which is not quite a square, but a widening in Karl Johan where the street changes gradient and direction — takes its name from Ole Eger, a merchant who lived here from 1804 in a building on the western side. His widow kept the property; his nephews Herman and Thorvald Eger eventually demolished the old structure around 1870 and built a three-storey commercial building in its place.
In the 1890s, the building was enlarged and rebuilt by Louis Samson, a consul for Hawaii with an eye for property. His son, Wilhelm Bismarck Samson, opened a bakery on the ground floor in 1894. W.B. Samson — the name still above the door today — has been baking and selling pastries on that corner ever since. The city has changed around it in almost every conceivable way, but the bakery has outlasted regulation changes, urban clearances, the arrival of the underground, and more than a century of shifting taste.
The square itself came into existence in 1846, when the old Stabellgården was demolished to allow the western boulevard — Slotsveien, as it was then known — to be connected through to Østre Gade, the old street running through Kvadraturen. Both sections were eventually absorbed into a single continuous street named Karl Johans gate in 1852. Egertorget was not planned; it emerged from a gap left by demolition, at the point where the two street levels meet and the avenue tilts in both directions. That is still, perhaps, the most accurate way to describe it: a place shaped by what was taken away, and kept alive by what was built in its place.
