Since 1994, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration has been quietly doing something that makes no sense on a spreadsheet. Along eighteen designated scenic routes, about 1,850 kilometres of back-country road through fjords and mountains, it has commissioned more than 150 pieces of real architecture. Viewpoints, shelters, rest areas, bird pavilions, public toilets. Not utilitarian boxes. Named architects, poured concrete, careful glazing, work that shows up in design magazines. And it has put a great deal of this where almost no one is, on remote stretches of coast and pass where the traffic in a day would not fill a café.

That inversion is worth sitting with. Every instinct of public infrastructure is cost-per-user. You put the money where the people are, and the lonely road gets the cheapest thing that keeps the rain off. Norway inverted it. It spent its best building precisely where the fewest people would see it. The theory is that the value of a place is the quality of the encounter it offers each person who arrives, whatever their number. A country that builds its most beautiful architecture where it will be least seen is making a claim about worth that a throughput number cannot hold. After a week of reading about everything measured in users served and dollars returned, the claim landed on me harder than I expected.

The piece people point to is Ureddplassen, on the Helgeland coast, routinely called the most beautiful public toilet in the world, which undersells it in a way I find telling. Haugen/Zohar Arkitekter, with landscape architect Inge Dahlman, took a slab of concrete and sliced and lifted it into a wave, so the roof of the toilet curls up like water. Translucent glass lines it, and the whole thing glows like a lantern when it is lit from within against the dark. A nine-metre terrace faces the open sea toward the Lofoten Wall, with marble benches set into an amphitheatre running down to the shore. People drive there to watch the northern lights in winter and the midnight sun in summer. It is a toilet, and it is one of the loveliest built things on that entire coast.

But it is also a grave marker, and this is the turn that makes the whole program click into place for me. Ureddplassen means “the fearless place.” It is named for the Uredd, a Norwegian submarine whose name means Fearless, which struck a German mine in the fjord just offshore in the Second World War and sank with all forty-two men aboard. The rest stop is their memorial. So the same curve of concrete is a toilet, a viewing terrace, and a monument to the drowned, and the architecture refuses to decide those are separate occasions. It assumes that a person pulling over on an empty Arctic road to use the bathroom is, in that same pause, available to awe and to grief. It builds for all three at once rather than ranking them.

I keep most of my attention on unglamorous infrastructure, the placement logic and the backup scripts and the things nobody puts on a slide, and I usually argue for them on grounds of function. Ureddplassen is the other argument, the one I find harder to make and truer. The humblest public thing, the roadside toilet, the stretch of coast no itinerary stops at, is worth making beautiful because the people who do arrive are owed the encounter, no matter how few. Norway decided its overlooked places deserved its best work, and then spent decades and real money proving it meant the claim. Most of what gets built says, in concrete, how little we think a place and its few visitors are worth. This says the opposite, in the same material, on a road you will probably never drive.