Just another barcode Mystery Cache

The Barcode project is a section of the Bjørvika portion of the Fjordbyen (Fjord City) redevelopment on former dock and industrial land in central Oslo. It consists of a row of new multi-purpose high-rise buildings, due to be completed in 2014. The developer is marketing the project as OperaKvarteret (The Opera Quarter).
It will consist of 12 separate buildings, where around 10,000 people will have their workplace and around 3,000 people will have their home in several hundred new apartments.

The Barcode buildings are placed between Dronning Eufemias gate, which will be the main east-west thoroughfare in the Bjørvika neighborhood, and Trelastgata, which will run alongside the rail lines to Oslo Central Station on the northern side.

There has been intense public debate about the project. It is planned as a series of different looking buildings, tall, long and narrow, with transparency and see-through design letting light in, and the expressed purpose of the barcode building principle is to avoid a massive wall between the bay and the city behind.
Some are enthusiastic about the fresh architecture, the "champagne apartments", and the unmatched opportunity to reshape the urban landscape and relieve pressure on a rapidly growing city without diminishing existing green space. However, there has been widespread criticism of the heights and designs of the Barcode buildings, both from architects and from citizens of Oslo. The Barcode has been described as a barrier between the fjord and the rest of the city that will destroy Oslo's character as an open, low-rise city with a lot of green space and cast a permanent shadow on adjacent neighborhoods for the benefit of a rich few. The architecture has been described as chaotic, as part of a trend of so-called "message buildings," which within a few years will be seen as having disfigured the city.

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. One-dimensional (1D) barcodes represent data in varying widths and spacings of parallel lines (simply explained). The technology behind barcodes is constantly improving and many 2D systems using other symbols than bars now also exist.
Because they are fast, simple, universal, low cost and extremely accurate, they are today widespread used in applications like marking items in stores and warehouses, tracking of item movement (mail, parcels, luggage, cars), identifying patients in hospitals, verifying tickets etc.