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Listed Urinal in Stensparken, Oslo/Norway. Photo: Arne B. Langleite |
2009 was the Norwegian Year of Cultural Heritage, as designated by the Norwegian government in its white paper “Living with Our Cultural Heritage”.
Its main theme, “Cultural Heritage in Everyday Life” encouraged the democratisation and popularisation of a recurrently elitist pursuit.
The Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway (Riskantikvaren) marked the year by listing twelve objects that would specifically represent communal values and experiences. Among the usual suspects relating to small town and rural culture such as kiosks and milk collection points, there is the more uncommon object of a public urinal.
The urinal in Stensparken, designed as a piece of street furniture by one of Oslo´s municipal architects, has aesthetic and historic value as a representative example of 1930s Scandinavian functionalism and urban sanitation.
Its distinctive appearance gained it a number of monikers such as “The Mushroom”, “The Umbrella”.
However, of greater interest and major influence to the decision of Riksantikvaren to list this particular structure are the nontangible values reflected in the colloquial name of the locale as “Love´s Merry-go-round”: the urinal was a popular and well frequented meeting place for Oslo´s gay community during a time when homosexuality was afflicted with serious social stigma.
