General Trick Blogger

The Bodø concert hall, Norway, will provide a new home for the Arctic Philharmonic. Photographs: David Grandorge

But this is an unlikely project: a new £110m library and concert hall in the Arctic town of Bodø (population 50,000), designed by a small London practice whose most substantial built work prior to winning the contract was an office extension in Sheffield.

“It was quite a leap in scale, for us and the town,” says David Howarth, director of DRDH architects, which won the project in a competition in 2009. “It was a stark contrast to be working on this in the UK, just as libraries were being closed by the dozen and procurement processes make it impossible for small practices to win work of this size.”

Described by the town’s mayor as “the largest municipal project ever”, and the symbol of “Bodø entering a new era,” the scheme is part of a wider attempt to lure people north and rebalance Norway’s bottom-heavy cultural offering. When the civil aviation authority was recently moved to Bodø as part of the national decentralisation programme, 40% of its employees quit.

“We wanted to give people a reason to stay, rather than just passing through on the way to the popular Lofoten Islands,” says former mayor Odd-Tore Fygle, who began planning the “Kulturhus” project back in 1999.

But not all the town’s residents were so keen. DRDH’s stark white concrete design was variously lambasted as looking like a margarine factory, a fish oil plant and something lifted from the eastern bloc. “The Germans did a lot of damage to our city in the war,” wrote one furious local. “And now you’ve come to finish the job.”

But in the event, 20% of the town’s entire population turned up to the opening of the complex, aptly christened Stormen (Norwegian for storm). And now they’ve had a chance to look inside, most people couldn’t be happier with the finished building.

“It’s beyond all of my expectations,” says Mona Halsbakk, as her children clamber on the library’s small house-shaped book trolleys, designed to mirror the huts outside. “Many preferred a more iconic design on the shortlist that looked like a great big glacier, similar to Oslo’s opera house. But I think this building fits much better into the town and has a clean Scandinavian style.”

Standing like a pair of classical temples, crossed with the low-slung sheds of nearby fish factories, the buildings feel both heroic and humble. A monumental colonnade of slender ribs marches across the waterfront facades, echoed in a grand entrance portico. But as you walk around the site, there is a shift in scale, where the back-of-house meets the town with a street-like frontage. It is the opposite of the usual swaggering cultural buildings that have defined the Noughties, taking its lessons from the grain of the town rather than landing on the waterfront like an architectural spaceship sent down from planet Regeneration.

The architects spent careful months attuning the complex to its context, creating a subtle urban ensemble that riffs off its neighbours. The roofline picks up the mountains, while parapets and windows are echoed in the white concrete facades, layered towards the harbour like a series of stage-set flats.

Built from pre-cast blocks arranged with the care of fine timber panelling, the facades have a monolithic quality, cycling from warm gold to icy blue in the ever-changing Arctic light. With rare attention to tactile quality, the concrete surface is polished in places, giving a pearly sheen, while in others it is washed down to a matte texture or finely ribbed to mimic the timber cladding of houses nearby.

“There was a level of trust that allowed us to make a total project, in a way that simply doesn’t happen any more in the UK,” says co-director Daniel Rosbottom, walking inside the timber-lined lobby of the concert hall, where the interior is as lovingly crafted as the exterior. A generous staircase winds through the building, giving glimpses into rehearsal rooms, while cosy corner bars are designed like a “stack of London pubs,” each lined with a different earthy-coloured fibreboard sampled from local houses.

Providing a new home for the recently-formed Arctic Philharmonic, the concert hall was developed with Arup acoustic engineers as a revolutionary two-in-one structure, able to flip from proscenium theatre to full symphonic hall at the flick of a switch, thanks to movable felt-lined panels and an ingenious folding bridge structure.

There is also a separate recital room and a nightclub-style basement venue – which will soon be put to the test by Mayhem, the Norwegian black metal band known for its DIY pyrotechnics, igniting barrels filled with paraffin and iron filings live on stage.

Many mayors have succumbed to the lure of the iconic concert hall, seduced by architectural fairy-dust to drain the public coffers into monuments to their own vanity. Hamburg’s Elbe Philharmonic, designed as a towering glass cathedral by Swiss maestros Herzog and de Meuron, is now seven years late and more than €500m over budget. The twisted metal mountain of Jean Nouvel’s Philharmonie de Parisclimbs above the trees of Parc de la Villette as fast as its budget escalates, now more than twice the planned cost and two years behind schedule.

In Bodø, DRDH has achieved a rare miracle – completing two big cultural buildings on time and on budget – and proved, against all the rules of UK procurement, that architects don’t have to have designed a library or opera house to be able to design one. In fact they’ll probably give it more care if they haven’t.

Demand for Brent crude has stalled as global economic growth has slowed and US oil shale supplies flooded the market. Photograph: Andy Buchanan/PA

The value of benchmark Brent crude has plunged in recent months from $115 in June to as low as $77. Demand has stalled as global economic growth has slowed and expanding US oil shale supplies flooded the market.

A growing number of Opec members led by Venezuela, Ecuador and Libya have called for the cartel to curb its production in an attempt to force up prices closer to the $90 that most of them want.

Some traders and oil analysts, including those at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, believe that up to 500,000 barrels a day could be sliced off Opec quotas.

“They’re running around like chickens without a head, but they’re going to do something,” Francisco Blanch, the bank’s head of global commodities, told CNBC.

Oil prices were also pushed up on Friday by positive data on the state of the US economy, with jobless totals down, home sales strengthening and factory activity growing at its fastest pace in two decades.

But not everyone believes OPEC will come to a definite decision, not least because its most influential member, Saudi Arabia, has indicated it is willing to see prices fall further.

“There are mixed messages from OPEC – it’s going to be a very interesting meeting. Will Saudi Arabia still be the kingpin or will it create a bit of dissent between those members who want to maintain production and others who want to cut output?” Jonathan Barratt, chief investment officer at financial adviser, Ayers Alliance, told Reuters.

Victor Shum, the managing director of downstream energy consulting with the IHS consultancy, was even more downbeat: “It will be very difficult for Opec to agree a cut and announce a headline number.”

The precipitous fall in oil prices since the summer was largely unpredicted by the industry and has spawned a raft of conpiracy theories.

Some believe that Opec has been happy to encourage a fall in a bid to undermine the American shale “revolution”, which has turned the US from a massive importer to a potential exporter of oil.

Shale oil production has risen by 1m barrels a day in the past 12 months alone so that US output has reached 9m barrels – its highest level for almost 30 years.

Local oil and gas prices have slumped and spawned a manufacturing boom but all this could be threatened because the costs of extracting shale are high.

Other theories suggest that Opec and the US are working together to reduce crude values to put further pressure on Russia over Ukraine. The Russian economy is heavily dependent on commodity prices and the rouble has been heavily hit by the downturn in oil and gas prices.

Shares in the oil production and services sector have fallen heavily since the summer and triggered a raft of merger and acquisition activity. Last week, Halliburton, the world’s second largest services group, revealed it was in takeover talks with the number three group, Baker Hughes.

But while the price slump has hit producing companies and countries, it represents a boost to the many more countries that are heavily dependent on energy imports. Lower energy prices cut the cost of manufacturing and transport, lowering inflation rates and potentially encouraging more global economic output.

In 2008, before the financial crash, the cost of Brent blend reached $148 while in the late 1990s the cost was down to below $10.