News: plans to move a museum housing the works of artist Edvard Munch to a new building by Spanish firm Herreros Arquitectos have been formally approved following five years of political dispute.

The new Munch Museum was finally given the go-ahead by Oslo's city council yesterday, having previously been put on hold over questions regarding its location on the city's Bjørvika waterfront.

The building is part of a redevelopment in the former docklands by Herreros Arquitectos, who won an international competition for the project in 2009.

It will be located 200 metres from the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet by Snøhetta, which opened in 2008 and won the Mies van der Rohe Award for architecture the following year.

The new building will be more than three times the size of the present Munch Museum and will increase the exhibition areas fourfold.

Herreros Arquitectos says the new museum "is conceived as an institution which is open to the city and highly visible, which must be visited many times in a lifetime because of its dynamic programs but also because of its power as a place of concentration, walks and daily relaxation in its terraces and cafes or even because of its retail spaces."

The approval means work on the building can now continue, with completion scheduled for 2018.

The controversial masterplan for the Bjørvika Barcode area includes a bank building resembling a stack of brick cubes, completed by Dutch studio MVRDV last year, and an office and residential building with an open elevated garden by Norwegian architects A-Lab – see all of our stories about Oslo.