It's only fair that a structure devoted to Edvard Munch's life and work makes you want to scream.

The tortured Norwegian artist's £235 million mega museum looms over the Oslo waterfront like an intimidating grey tower, lurching out at the top like a military observation post, keeping watch over the fjord. The ultimate villain's headquarters, an almost comically threatening edifice leaned over the pure white iceberg of the city's cherished opera theater with a thuggish hunch, is a site scout's fantasy.

Although it seems to be an appropriate container for Munch's wounded psyche, whose shadow hangs enormous over the city, the anxiety-inducing effect was not entirely deliberate.

"We wanted to create a welcoming vertical symbol," explains Juan Herreros, the 13-story complex's Spanish architect. "We thought the city needed a statement in a prominent location for this amazing artist, despite the local tendency for modesty." It offers a fresh vantage point from which visitors may see the countryside in a new light."

The museum, which has been in the works for more than a decade and has been subject to significant political fighting over its cost, shape, and location, eventually opened on Friday, becoming one of the world's biggest devoted to a single artist. It's a colossal Munch mall, a soaring stack of 11 galleries linked by zigzagging escalators and topped with a rooftop café and bar.

"Forget everything you know about museums," says Stein Olav Henrichsen, the museum's director. “This is completely unique.”

For starters, the term "museum" has been eliminated. This is just MUNCH in an effort to reach new audiences who may be turned off by the m-word. Its bold all-caps emblem, which is tilted back 20 degrees to match the tower's tilt, is inscribed on the exterior in luminous, full-storey letters.

Teens skating approaching the building, messaging each other with scream emojis, on their way to hang out, not simply gaze at art, are featured in a promotional film. Henrichsen says that a jam-packed schedule of activities and performances will "keep this house alive every day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m."

They'll have plenty of guests owing to Munchmania across the world. The approaching throngs, however, seem to have influenced the design: the whole area appears to have been built to process the hordes as quickly as possible.

Through large glass doors, a functional entryway with a store and café leads to the ranks of escalators and elevators, where people are funneled up between the landings and into the galleries. Grey floors, grey walls, and grey ceilings dominate the space, with glass balustrades, steel trim, and aluminium mesh cladding completing the chilly, clinical palette.

Seats are located at the end of these lengthy landings, and monitors contribute to the departure lounge atmosphere, but this is not a location where you want to loiter or walk aimlessly. It resembles a vertical art conveyor belt.

"I come from a generation that has gone to too many horizontal museums," Herreros explains, "where there are more people wandering around aimlessly than actually looking at the paintings." “We wanted to make a paradise for curators, where the art is the protagonist,” he adds, in contrast to these free-flowing, public-space-filled museums, which are frequently more about stunning architecture than content.

In the sense that the galleries themselves are all neutral, rectangular, black-box spaces with a variety of heights, with no architectural whimsy getting in the way, he has achieved. "We're not like Zaha," he continues, alluding to the late Zaha Hadid, who created galleries with awkward angled walls that he claims "kill curators every day."

The star of the show is, of course, Munch, whose 26,700 paintings now have four times the area of the old 1960s museum in Tyen, 2 kilometers to the north-east. From a gallery of his monumental canvases (which had to be craned through a hole in the side of the building) to a floor dedicated to his woodcuts, complete with a textured table where you can rub your own Munch relief, five thematic exhibitions explore the artist's many facets.

Another area displays his early selfie experiments, which he began after purchasing a Kodak Brownie camera in 1902, including an amazing shot of himself power-posing on the beach in a loin robe, paintbrush in hand.

Another escalator trip will take you to a temporary exhibition that features Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch's work on two levels (partly shown at the Royal Academy last year). They make unusual bedfellows, enjoying one other's bed-bound suffering with their tormented, smeary paintings.

The litter of used tissues and tampons mimicking Munch's habit of putting his paintings outdoors in the forest to become coated in mud and bird droppings, Emin's filthy bed seems precisely like the type of setting he would have been at home in.

On a level that recreates ghostly black images from his house and studio, showcasing his paintbrushes, palettes, and even the breathing machine he used to treat his longterm lung issues, further insights into his family life are presented. If you want to visit the museum in one day, you may need comparable assistance. It's a difficult task, but it results in a detailed portrait of the artist. "We are more than just The Scream," Henrichsen says.

They owe their new home mostly to the destiny of that twisted, gaping face, which has become a worldwide fixture of Halloween costumes and emoji keyboards. In 2004, one of the paintings from The Scream was stolen (and subsequently recovered) from the Tyen museum, generating discussion about the need for a more secure building. A theatrical technique has been used to heighten the drama of Munch's best-known piece, in addition to improved security and climate-controlled galleries.

In a darkly lit shrine on the seventh floor, the museum holds three separate copies of The Scream – painting, crayon, and lithograph – but only one is ever displayed. The other two stay concealed behind black doors, each revealing themselves for an hour at a time. The National Museum may possess the first and most renowned version of the painting (which will reopen in a new location across town next year), "but now we're giving them some competition," adds Henrichsen. They're definitely raising the stakes at the gift store.

The pained, trembling visage can be seen on anything from tote bags and pencils to glasses cases, paintboxes, and even a £17,800 diamond-encrusted ring.

The Munch marathon comes to a close on an open-air roof terrace flanked by a rooftop bar and restaurant (unfortunately not named Munchies), which leans out to take in the vista of the Bjrvika shoreline. The neighborhood has evolved from a container port to the city's cultural centre, with the opera house, an incredible new library, and now MUNCH, all bordered by the garish "barcode" construction of high-rise buildings and hotels behind – with which the museum's tower was partially built to compete.

With layers of heavy steelwork and slanted windows generating the impression of being boxed in, imprisoned in a zone of consuming, the roof terrace does a superb job of concealing the view for a location supposed to give panoramic panoramas. Munch was never free of his torments, and the visitor will not be either.

"Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder," he wrote. I'd want to maintain those pains." He had no idea how his trauma would manifest itself – and how it would end up as a 60-meter-high nervous behemoth of aluminum and glass.

Thanks to Oliver Wainwright at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.