Sverre Fehn
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
1997
The Guggenheim Museum Construction Site
Bilbao, Spain
May 31, 1997
Contents of this Page:
Bill Lacy
Executive Director, The Pritzker Prize
J. Carter Brown
Director Emeritus, National Gallery of Art
Chairman, U.S. Commission of Fine Arts
Chairman, Pritzker Architecture Prize Jury
Jay A. Pritzker
President, The Hyatt Foundation
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(photos will be added to this page)
Nearly 400 guests from around the world gathered in Bilbao, Spain on
Saturday, May 31, 1997 to celebrate the presentation of the 1997 Pritzker Architecture
Prize to Sverre Fehn of Oslo, Norway. Fehn, who is 72, is the twentieth Pritzker Laureate
to receive the $100,000 grant and bronze medallion.
Early in the day, a press conference was held for the Laureate for
some thirty representatives from radio, television and print media of Europe and the
United States.
The presentation was held that evening in the construction site of the
Guggenheim Museum (photo top of next page), a new building designed by 1989 Pritzker
Laureate, Frank Gehry of Los Angeles, California. The location was doubly appropriate, not
only as an homage to Spain, the native country of the 1996 Laureate, Rafael Moneo, but
also because for the second consecutive year, the ceremony was held in a
"work-in-progress."
The 1996 ceremony was held in Los Angeles in the then unfinished Getty
Center, designed by 1984 Pritzker Laureate, Richard Meier. As jury chairman, J. Carter
Brown explains, "By moving the ceremony around the world to sites of architectural
significance each year, the aims of the Pritzker Prize are served above and beyond the
primary purpose of singling out one architect to honor each year. Last year and this year,
by using works that were still under construction, we symbolize a look to the future of
architecture. In other years, we have looked to the past as well, using such locations as
Versailles, Prague Castle and the Todai-ji Buddhist Temple in Japan. In every instance, we
are paying homage to architects and builders from recent as well as distant history. All
of this attention helps focus the public's awareness on great architecture, and what it
can mean to people's lives."
When the guests arrived at the Guggenheim, they walked down a long
flight of stairs that had been completed that afternoon.
Caption: Press conference: (l to r) Thomas Krens, director of the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Juan Ignacio Vidarte, director of the Guggenheim Bilbao;
previous Pritzker Laureates Christian de Portzamparc of France (1994), (behind
Portzamparc) Rafael Moneo of Spain (1996), and Hans Hollein of Austria (1985); and
Pritzker jurors Charles Correa of India; Jorge Silvetti of Argentina and the U.S.; Ada
Louise Huxtable of the U.S.; and Toshio Nakamura of Japan.
(l to r) Bill Lacy, J. Carter Brown, Sverre Fehn at the press conference.
Sverre Fehn at the press conference.
Caption: Arriving at the ceremony (r to l) Mr. & Mrs. Jay A.
Pritzker, Mrs. Garro, Basque Country President Antonio Ardanza Garro, Frank Gehry, Mr. and
Mrs.Sverre Fehn.
Two views of the guests arriving in the atrium. (above and left)
Two views of the presentation ceremony in the gallery referred to as
"the fish." (above and left).
Two views of the gallery known as "the boat" where the
formal dinner was held (above and below).
Sverre Fehn was presented to President and Mrs. Garro by Juan Ignacio
Vidarte, the director of Guggenheim Bilbao.
Bill Lacy
Executive Director
The Pritzker Architecture Prize
Good evening ladies and gentlemen; Excellency, Mr. President of the
Basque Country; Excellency, Mr. President of Biscay; Friends of Architecture, and Friends
of Sverre Fehn.
I am Bill Lacy, Executive Director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize,
and in my spare time, President of Purchase College.
It is my pleasure to welcome you to this evening's program in Bilbao,
one of the most exciting cities in Europe. We are here to celebrate the career and life's
work of Sverre Fehn, and his elevation to membership in a very small and elite group, the
Laureates of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize was created to correct an omission of
architecture from the Nobel prizes. And it has, in the past eighteen years, risen to a
position of great esteem in the field and raised the general public's awareness of the
importance that architecture plays in their lives.
Since the Prize's founding to the present, the practice of
architecture has changed in many ways. Often it seems in today's culture that we are media
driven, that architects are more interested in building careers than in building great
buildings, large and small. That is one of the reasons that tonight's honoree, Sverre
Fehn, stands apart.
He has labored long and hard in his beautiful Norway, not necessarily
to be famous, but to be responsible to his great talent. His career exemplifies an
earlier, more durable model of the great architect, one who serves his clients well, many
of whom are present this evening to acknowledge Fehn's contribution to architecture and to
their lives.
Sverre Fehn and the late James Stirling taught together at the
Architectural Association in London many years ago. And when Jim was notified that he had
been awarded the third Pritzker Architecture Prize, Fehn congratulated him and said how
great an honor it was. Stirling replied, "Don't worry, one day you will win it
also." Today is that day.
And now it's my honor to introduce His Excellency, President of the
Basque Country, Mr. Antonio Ardanza Garro.
Ladies and gentlemen, my most cordial welcome to the Basque Country,
Bilbao and to this building which will soon house the Guggenheim Museum. Your selection of
this site for the presentation of the prestigious Pritzker Prize of Architecture
constitutes a great honor for us as well as a motive of profound satisfaction.
Many of you today visit this country for the first time. Let me
present it to you in great mass and brief words. The town in which you now find
yourselves, the Basque town, is known throughout the world, among other things, because of
two attributes that characterize it in a very special manner: its antiquity and its
closeness to its identity.
In truth, we are, the Basques, an ancient people, perhaps the people
in Europe which have remained identical to themselves for the longest time, conserving
alive their unique tongue and preserving their ancestral costumes and institutions.
Therefore we are, as we are recognized, a people consisting only of
themselves and not exempt from a dash of pride and even a certain dose of self-compliance.
But this said, whoever would think that our conscience, our pride and our self-compliance
would be enough reasons to explain, by themselves, our permanence as a people throughout
the length of history would be mistaken.
Because if history has taught us anything with its inexorable pace, it
is precisely that it has been able to slumber consciences just as much or more rooted as
ours, humiliate pride more indomitable and ridicule other self-compliances, engulfing in
the zenith of its oblivion identities of many, and many peoples that barely have even left
us a trace of their existence.
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Thomas Krens
Director
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
Ladies and gentlemen, my responsibility this evening is the briefest
of anyone here. On behalf of the Guggenheim Foundation, its Board of Trustees, it's my
great honor to welcome such a distinguished group to a Guggenheim Museum. There indeed is
a complex story here. This is not the time to tell it. This evening is for the new
Pritzker Laureate, Sverre Fehn. Your work is inspirational. You've been a great architect,
but you've joined the ranks of a very, very select and distinguished group. I'd like to
thank the Pritzkers for in fact recognizing architecture, presenting it to the world as
one of the great arts. And it's our pleasure indeed to be able to be allowed to
participate in this event. So to you, Mr. Fehn, and to Jay Pritzker and his family,
welcome to Bilbao. I'm Basque, and I hope you come back in October.
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J. Carter BROWN
Chairman of the Jury
Pritzker Architecture Prize
Your Excellency, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen. The
man who starts the program can't introduce himself, but Bill Lacy is the Executive
Director of the Pritzker Prize and has been so helpful to our Jury. I have a wonderful
Jury, and the Pritzker Prize is very fortunate to have such a distinguished and
international group, and I would like simply to introduce them to you here tonight. Only
one of our number could not be here tonight, but he was here yesterday, Giovanni Agnelli,
Chairman of Fiat, who is from Italy. Many people think he is Italy, and he had to go back.
But we do have from Tokyo, Toshio Nakamura. Toshio, do you want to stand? The Chairman of
the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, who started life in Argentina, of Italian
ancestry, Jorge Silvetti. Ada Louise Huxtable is a byword in the architectural firmament
for critical excellence, having been the architecture critic of the New York Times
, Ada Louise. Charles Correa of Bombay, India, is in his own right a winner of the gold
medals of the International Union of Architects and the Royal Institute of British
Architects, as well as the Aga Khan Prize, and is a great intellectual and connoisseur.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out one other juror who is not
currently on the Jury but used to be. His name is Frank Gehry.
As you know, this fabulous building is not only a work of art. One, at
least, of its functions is to be a setting for great works of art. And when you go down to
dinner tonight, you will see one of them. It weighs only a hundred and seventy-four tons,
and the man who brought it here and created it is also here, Richard Serra.
But we are here tonight, as has been said, because of the current
winner, who will be introduced by someone who really symbolizes the other aspect of
architecture that often is not given its proper due. And that is patronage. We are in a
setting which is the result of the enlightened patronage of the Basque Country. We are
about to see also works of art which will have been provided by them. And the idea of
being the patron of buildings has been extended by Jay and Cindy Pritzker to being patrons
of the idea of architecture itself.
A full partner in this operation has been Jay's fabulous wife, Cindy.
And I would ask her to stand, Cindy, your hostess tonight. Jay and Cindy themselves
received a prestigious award for their contribution to architecture at the National
Building Museum just a year ago, its tenth anniversary Honor Award. All that we have been
able to accomplish on this Jury is due to the enlightenment of them, of The Hyatt
Foundation, of Jay's son Tom, and their trustees such as Allen Turner. We are very, very
grateful. And now I turn this podium over to Jay Pritzker himself.
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JAY A. PRITZKER
President
The Hyatt Foundation
That's an impossible act to follow. Excellency, Mr. President of
the Basque Country; Excellency, Mr. President of Biscay; ladies and gentlemen.
This is a ceremony to bestow the twentieth Pritzker Architecture Prize
upon Sverre Fehn of Norway, a country that can already lay claim to three Nobel Prizes for
Literature, a great tradition in the arts, with painters such as Munch, composers such as
Grieg, and playwrights such as Ibsen. The list of accomplishments of this small country
could go on indefinitely.
Each year we attempt to pay homage to a number of other people and
places. By choosing a site in Spain this year, we chose to honor last year's Laureate,
Rafael Moneo. Rafael was with us last night and this morning. His mother just passed away,
so he had to leave.
By choosing this particular building in Spain, we honor another
Laureate, Frank Gehry. It always gives us great pleasure to see laureates continue to
build outstanding works, and certainly this Guggenheim Bilbao is that and more. And we
thank the Guggenheim Foundation for inviting us.
In a way, these ceremonies have become a sort of "can you top
this." But there's a reason. We try to keep the Prize as prominent as possible, if we
are to be effective in making people aware of good architecture. Last year, we were in the
construction site of the new Getty Center in Los Angeles, designed by yet another
Laureate, Richard Meier. The year before that, we were in the Palace of Versailles. Some
of these are not easy venues to compete with. But this does. And before that, we went to
Columbus, which is a small town in Indiana, with which many of you are probably not
familiar. But it's probably got more great architecture per square mile, certainly more
great modern architecture per square mile, than any other city in America. That was also a
way of paying homage to one of our original jurors, Irwin Miller, whose foresight made
that town's accomplishment possible.
And speaking of jurors, we honor ours for their uncompromising
integrity and ability in marking excellence. Carter has been chairman from the inception
in 1979, and I think whatever success this Prize may have had is very much due to Carter's
leadership. We're delighted that so many of the current jurors were able to come tonight.
This year they've chosen a man to honor whose career spans fifty
years. During this time, he's won the respect and admiration of his peers, not only in
Scandinavia, but also throughout Europe. He first caught the attention of the
international audience with the Norwegian Pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.
Within two years, his Scandinavian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale again captured world
acclaim. And the latter was built in Venice's only public park. It didn't disturb the
trees. They continue to grow up through the building. It's been hailed as a tribute to
Fehn's theories of architectural light and shadow. Although he has said that he thought he
was running from traditional Norwegian architecture, in the end he realized he was working
within its contexts. How he interprets the site, the light, and building materials all
have a strong relationship to his origins.
Architecture has always been an international art, more so perhaps in
recent history. In fact, one thing I often note is that Frank Gehry comes from Los Angeles
to build a building in Spain, and Rafael goes to Los Angeles to build a building in Los
Angeles. Doesn't sound very efficient. When Sverre Fehn graduated from architecture school
in 1949 in Oslo, Alvar Aalto was exerting a strong influence on all of Europe, including
Norway's leading architect of the time, Arne Korsmo, who designed the 1937 Paris
Exposition Pavilion. Korsmo became a mentor to Sverre Fehn, introducing him to Jean
Prouvé and Le Corbusier. It was also during this period that Fehn rubbed elbows with
another Scandinavian, Jorn Utzon of Denmark, who did the Sydney Opera House, another great
building of our era.
In the years that the Prize has existed, there have been seven
architects chosen from the United States. One of them was born in Ireland. One was born in
China. Today, they are far outnumbered by the twelve from other countries: France, Japan,
Portugal, Italy, Austria, Germany, Mexico. And tonight we add Norway to the list.
In addition to an international panoply of laureates, we embarked on a
grand tour of ceremonial locations. It was sort of a late thought, but it worked out very
well. We went to Todai-ji Temple in Nara, Japan; to Goldsmiths' Hall in London; to Palazzo
Grassi in Venice; to Prague Castle. And it's been a wonderful world tour. We visited a
number of landmarks in the United States as well: including the National Gallery, the Met,
the Kimball, and what is now the National Building Museum in Washington, and Chicago's Art
Institute.
I reminisce about these various locations for the same reason they
were chosen to begin with, to make the Prize and its recipients as high-profile throughout
the world as possible, and thus a recognizable mark of international excellence. For it is
only with such status that the Prize can make any difference.
Described by many as the "Poet of the Straight Line," Sverre
Fehn thinks in poetic terms, saying that architecture has a story to tell. The materials
of construction are his alphabet with which he writes a story. For him, there's no
architecture without construction. The Pritzker Jury lauds Sverre Fehn for his fascinating
and exciting combination of modern forms tempered by Scandinavian tradition, and for
blending fantasy and reality into buildings that are both contemporary and timeless. For
fifty years of virtuosity and creativity, I'd like to present the 1997 Architecture Prize
to Sverre Fehn.
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I am standing here tonight feeling honored and grateful to receive the
most important prize in our society of architecture. All my gratitude to Mr. and Mrs.
Pritzker and the members of The Hyatt Foundation.
It is characteristic that the Pritzker Prize is an American award. It
is an example of a society which has the generosity to let architectural freedom be born.
And this museum by Frank Gehry expresses the instant of freedom,
having preserved the genius idea of the sketches. And by this process, it has liberated
itself from history. Thank you, Gehry.
I want to express my gratitude to all of you, collaborators- clients,
friends, and family who are present here in Bilbao to share with me this important event.
And I thank especially Henrik Hille, who has worked out with me my latest projects.
I am very pleased for the place chosen for this celebration, Spain,
where the big constructions hide in the shadow of the bullfight. My wife often tells me
that I must have been Spanish in my early life, so I feel at home.
I will now present some fragments from my life as an architect. Within
himself, every man is an architect. His first step towards architecture is his walk
through nature.
He cuts a path like writing on the surface of the earth. The crushing
of grass and brushwood is an interference with nature, a simple definition of man's
culture. His path is a sign to follow. And through this initial movement, he requires the
movements of others. This is a most elementary form of a composition.
The globe is divided in longitude and latitude degrees. And each
crossing point has its certain climate, its certain plants and winds. As an architect, you
have to try to understand the difference of life in each point. Independent of these
geographical points, the human thoughts float like clouds over the surface of Earth, and
architecture is brought to life in the duel between nature and the irrational.
My nearly fifty-years-long journey into the world of architecture I
started by winning a competition for a museum at Lillehammer, together with Geir Grung,
just after having finished the architectural studies in Oslo. I took an advice from Jorn
Utzon of going to Morocco to study so-called primitive architecture.
I would like to read some words I put down during this winter in
Africa: "Traveling south today to Morocco to study primitive rural architecture is
not a journey of exploration to discover things. On the contrary, you recognize. Frank
Lloyd Wright's houses in Taliesin must seem like these, in disperse and with the same
roughness in the structure of the material, and Mies van der Rohe's walls, with the same
character of infinity. And here you find Le Corbusier's poem about the terrace and the
roof in the modern town plan."
This discovery became for me a tool to penetrate more deeply into
understanding of modern architecture. The architecture works within a timeless space. Its
signature is Anonymous.
In the year 1953, I got a French scholarship which gave me the
possibility to work without salary in the office of Jean Prouvé in Paris. I visited
frequently the office of Le Corbusier in Rue de Sevre 36. At this time, I also experienced
the atmosphere of the CIAM in its last period. And I remember Le Corbusier raising his
left hand to say goodbye to the Organization and all of us, in the corridor of the old
UNESCO building.
My most important journey was perhaps into the past, in the
confrontation with the Middle Age, when I built a museum among the ruins of the Bishops'
Fortress at Hamar. I realized, when working out this project, that only by manifestation
of the present, you can make the past speak. If you try to run after it, you will never
reach it.
But the great museum is the globe itself. In the surface of the earth,
the lost objects are preserved. The sea and the sand are the great masters of conservation
and make the journey into eternity so slow that we still find in these patterns the key to
the birth of our culture.
I miss, actually, John Hejduk here today. His writing and drawings
have meant a lot to me.
I would like to end with some words I wrote in a book about the
construction Security, built in Oslo: "John Hejduk has created a world where the
boundaries are erased. The architecture floats in the universe, extending from the cut of
the surgeon's scalpel into the inner organ of a human body, to his own cut through the
veil of invisibility into the vast landscape where the site is cleared for `The Cemetery
of the Ashes of Thought'."
Thank you.
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by
Ada Louise Huxtable
Author and Architecture Critic, The Wall Street Journal
Sverre Fehn is a builder, philosopher, and poet, and an extremely
gifted architect. Held in high esteem in professional circles, he is surprisingly little
known beyond them; the celebrity circuit seems to stop just south of Norway. At a time
when globe-circling stars promote "signature"styles, he has devoted himself to
the quiet, undeviating pursuit of a subtle, lyrical, and still stringently rational
architecture. His buildings, while well-published, are neither numerous nor easily
accessible — deep snow can make the roads to his Glacier museum on the montainous
west coast impassable until May — nothing is exactly on the beaten track. Like the
Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, Fehn has never fitted easily into the modernist canon;
each has managed to break the rules in a highly individual way, and each has had a
singular vision. Also like Aalto, Fehn's buildings must be visited to understand their
conceptual brilliance and aesthetic pleasures, and the particular and universal way they
belong to the land.
Sverre Fehn is, in fact, something of a paradox; his self-engendered
and sometimes curious contradictions can throw even his admirers off base. A respectful
inquiry at the press conference for the announcement of his Pritzker prize, about his
mastery of wood construction in the Scandinavian tradition, brought his somewhat
unsettling disclaimer, "I have spent my life running away from wood!" and a
brief discourse on his use of brick and concrete. What he did not explain was how he
utilizes concrete to anchor a building to a rocky ridge or hold back a forested slope, or
the way his brick or concrete walls combine with a light and elegant wooden superstructure
for a perfect integration of traditional and modern materials. Praised for his
extraordinary sensitivity to nature, Fehn says that the very act of building begins the
process of destruction, that every intervention, no matter how careful, contributes to the
landscape's loss. Beyond Oslo, the forests seem endless, only the trees interrupt the line
between earth and sky. The horizon, with its mysterious sense of limits and infinity, its
mythic and timeless connotations, is a constant presence in his art and life. But he sees
breaking the horizon line as an intrusive act of disruption and transformation, although,
in his hands, this violation turns infinity into perceived and controlled space and
establishes our perspective on the world. He possesses an almost magical ability to
emphasize and enhance the natural setting — the work of Frank Lloyd Wright comes
constantly to mind — and yet he insists that nature should never be regarded in a
romantic way, that the architect must create a tension between nature and his
intervention. There is nothing romantic about this idea; it poses one of architecture's
most demanding and enduring challenges.
Fehn has built some of the most remarkable museums in the world, but
the very idea of a museum troubles him. He considers the museum an instrument of a society
that denies death and overvalues material things; he is convinced that this secular age
has transferred the idea of immortality to objects, conferring on them a special power;
that we give to museums the position and respect accorded to cathedrals in earlier times.
But this has not kept him from creating buildings for this purpose that redefine the
museum's role in the modern world.
Fehn's style, so unaffected, so bound to the earth, is also a paradox
— these deceptively simple designs masquerading as indigenous naturalism are a
skilled and sophisticated synthesis of many influences. Although his architecture is
rooted deeply in Norway's forests, mountains and fjords, it owes as much to European
modernism as to his intimate understanding of his native land. He came of age as an
architect at the high point of the modernist revolution. His teacher, Arne Korsmo, a
Norwegian architect who traveled widely and built the Norwegian pavilion for the 1937
Paris Exposition, brought the radical new work to a post World War II generation of young
Norwegian architects still immersed in the nostalgia of Scandinavian romantic nationalism.
With a grant received from the French government in 1952, Fehn and his wife, Ingrid, a
musician, went to Paris, where they stayed two years. Korsmo introduced Fehn to Le
Corbusier, whose atelier was open evenings to any who cared to come. He remembers dinners
with Fernand Léger, Alvar and Elissa Aalto, Peter and Alison Smithson; he became a member
of CIAM, the Congrès Internationale d'Architecture Moderne, and was associated briefly
with Jean Prouvé. Today, in an act of homage and continuity, he lives and works in the
house and studio Arne Korsmo built for himself on a quiet street in Oslo, part of a small
enclave of other International Style houses softened by time, remodeling, and the
nostalgia of a revolution grown old. The modest entrance leads into a large,
double-height, Corbusian space full of light, music, art and books, and the collected
artifacts of a creative life.
The winters of the Paris sojourn were spent in North Africa,
discovering a world completely different from anything he had known. The simple geometry
and rational design of indigenous Moroccan buildings, with their flat roof terraces and
unadorned walls, were a dramatic confirmation that the aesthetic principles of
functionalist doctrine existed long before modernist theory embraced them. Like many
northerners, he reacted strongly to the intense southern light, comparing it to Norway's
"horizontal" light and "long shadows - a flickering, sensitive light,"
he explained later in an interview with L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui...(that)
"offers an infinite number of variations...architecture is frequently invisible,
enveloped in mist." Typically, he extended the description into an analogy of
northern light with northern character, where nothing is "exact or
direct...situations are not cut and dried,"and to literature, "Hamsun, Gogol,
and Chekhov described characters who are intuitive and dual-natured."
There is much about Fehn, also, that is intuitive and dual-natured.
Tall and slender, courteous and cool, he holds passionate convictions; as he comments on
what he sees as the absurdities and outrageousness of much in art, architecture and
behavior today, his tone moves between irony and tragedy, punctuated by quietly
incredulous laughter. He speaks in poetic parables about life and art, and his own art in
particular, that make Louis Kahn's utterances sound like plainspeak. The ideas and
convictions forged in the hot crucible of early modernism infuse his work with a morality
and integrity that have been lost in the postmodern pursuit of headline novelties. He has
never relinquished the logic and minimalism of the modernist aesthetic; unlike many others
who embraced modernism in its early years, he kept the faith. But his work has never
dead-ended; there is nothing dated or doctrinaire about it. Those looking for camp or
retro-nostalgia will not find it.
He designs without dogma, in human terms, rather than from a
theoretical base. He starts a house by measuring his clients. He is aware not only of how
light enters a building, but what light means in a country that comes stunningly alive
after long months of cold and dark. He has placed clerestory windows in a small house in
Oslo built in the 1960s - a thoughtful, modest structure of concentrated use and
continuous livability - to capture the luminous glow of the midnight sky. The Busk house
in southern Norway, built on a wooded, stony ridge overlooking the water, responds to
every aspect of the sun and seasons. Each solution is unique, whether it is fitting a
house to a family or inventing a new kind of "deconstructed" plan (although he
would never have thought of it that way) for the Skadalen School for deaf children in
Oslo, a complex that includes linked half circles set at right angles forming courtyards.
The result always involves a departure from accepted ideas and practice. Richard Weston's
perceptive analysis of Fehn's architecture in Building Design, in 1987, went
straight to the heart of the matter: "the power of his work lies in the clarity with
which he seems able to identify the conceptual essence of a problem, and the precision of
the architectural response." Although he, himself, stresses the primacy of
construction and the materials used, the way he builds goes far beyond structural
pragmatism to a sensuous celebration of a constantly evolving conceptual ideal. The
rationality of these unique and beautiful solutions, as well as the perfect control of
every detail, immediately evident in plans and sections, is confirmed by visits to his
buildings.
Long before today's emphasis on the design- and experience-expanding
innovations of ramps, bridges, rotated squares and multidimensional processional routes
through a series of related open spaces, Fehn was using these elements as organizing
devices. The Bødtker houses — two residences built at different times for different
generations of the same family — stand on a steep slope high above Oslo, with views
of the city and the Oslo fjord. For the first house, a platform and walls of brick are
topped with a wooden roof structure. A long, narrow entrance wing hugs the slope and leads
to the main building: a square into which another square, a stairwell, has been placed,
rotated at 45 degrees. This rotated square cuts the volume into four diagonal sections,
for communal and personal use. The later house, placed farther down the slope, is also a
cube; the entrance is from a roof terrace, with the living areas at the top and bedrooms
below. Diagonal glass walls open to the view. The two houses, and families, are joined by
a pool used in summer.
The Roros museum (shown below as a model, and with an end-view concept
drawing by Sverre Fehn) is planned as a bridge over a river on the site of former copper
mines. A long, straight, slender spine, one of Fehn's characteristic design devices,
serves display and circulation; the building itself forms the route from the ruins of the
furnaces to the cinder hills across the river.
The Hedmark Museum in Hamar is organized around a ramp that provides
an even more dramatic trip through time and space. Built within the shell of an old barn
over the ruins of a 12th century fortified Bishop's palace, the museum is inserted into
the ruins without touching them at any point; the new construction stands free from the
old stone walls. The fabric and the artifacts of the past are above, below, and along side
— always within touch, but clearly separated from the present, on another level in
time. The ramp's century-spanning route through religious, ethnographic, and simple human
history links a series of beautiful, revealing installations of excavated artifacts and
remarkable views that skilfully orchestrate the perception and experience of the objects
and their origins. The ramp starts from an exterior courtyard, enters the ethnographic
section in the north wing, proceeds over the rutted and stony archeological dig, through
simply and elegantly displayed secular and religious treasures and items of ordinary daily
life, to a new auditorium in the south wing. It widens into gallery spaces, becomes a
bridge over the actual dig, and leads to the recovered objects in dramatic, almost
free-standing exhibition cubes, or "cells" flooded with natural light from
above.
Where time and decay have left ragged openings in the stone walls,
Fehn has closed them with unframed glass cut to correspond to the ruin's rough edges,
mounting the glass invisibly for an artfully layered allusion to the passage of time.
Huge, laminated wood trusses span the space; everything else is board-formed raw concrete.
The deliberate contrast with the textured and timeworn stone creates an extremely strong
and evocative aesthetic that dramatically emphasizes the presence of history and the
reality of its survivals. In this setting, a Christ figure mounted on a single column
casts its striking shadow on an old wall; a reliquary and a Bible isolated in the concrete
cubes that function almost as "treasuries" give the past an iconic, and
intensely moving presence. Old farming equipment and household objects found on the site
bring the past to tangible, intimate life; iron mounts or glass cases of Scarpa-like
reductive simplicity make their changed context clear.
The design of the Hedmark museum is brilliant, often breathtaking, its
sensitivity matched only by its daring. It is a clear demonstration of the philosophy and
vocabulary that Fehn has developed for dealing with problems of preservation; the modern
intervention, uncompromisingly of our own time, is meant to reveal and emphasize the
nature of another time that is directly related to us, but no longer exists. Imitation or
reconstruction to simulate or "animate" history is beyond consideration.
"Those who pursue the past will never attain it, " he tells us. "Only the
manifestation of the present can bring the past to life." For Fehn, the act of
building is inseparable from an act of faith. The distinguished critic and historian, and
Fehn's fellow-Norwegian, Christian Norberg-Schulz, considers the Hedmark Museum one of the
best buildings of the century. Weston calls it "pure architecture of mesmerizing
power."
After functionalism had deteriorated into formalism, and even before
the revival of the symbolic role of architecture, every one of Fehn's buildings was
generated as much by its spirit and setting as by practical considerations. The Glacier
museum at Fjaerland, located between the sea and the mountains on a plain created by the
Josstedal glacier, just below its great mass of snow and ice, takes the glacier as its
theme; it is all about context and message. The building is tight, pure geometry,
expressive and absolute. It relies on the definition and strength of its abstract forms to
evoke the glacier's awe and splendor, shaping the visitor's experience by precise
architectural means. In plan, the museum is a long, thin spine with a circular,
drum-shaped auditorium and the angled glass walls of a restaurant projecting from it. Fehn
says that the vertical slits that split the building's volumes are references to the
glacier's cracks; the sharply angled glass suggests green glacial ice. But the signifiers
are less important than the way the building functions. A slate-roofed canopy leads to an
entrance between two flanking, monumental flights of stairs that ascend to a rooftop
viewing platform. The canopy rises dramatically, with the stairs, to join the roof, which
allows a corresponding rise in ceiling height inside and the insertion of clerestory
lighting. One can go in, to exhibition spaces, a library and the restaurant. Or one can go
up for the view of the glacier and its panoramic surroundings — a journey that can
seem like a trip into the clouds as the shifting mists sent down by the glacier's cold air
alternately conceal and reveal the breathtaking vista, sometimes threatening to envelop
the museum itself. Fehn's invention — for it is that — is a personal, poetic
interpretation of the subject and the site.
Fehn's houses are fine-tuned to the seasons and the time of day. The
owners of the Busk house on the southern coast start their day with the morning light, in
an enclosed small pool at the northeast end and finish it around a fireplace at the west
end, with the glow of the setting sun. The linear plan follows the building's construction
line on a rocky escarpment sloping down to the sea. A cross axis leads over a bridge to a
tower containing the childrens' rooms. The design was generated by the landscape and the
owners' lives; they requested, and received, designation for the house and its environs as
a protected site almost immediately after its completion.
All of Fehn's buildings have a gentle beauty that belies their
remarkable creativity, and an enormous, quiet, assurance born of conviction and skill.
There are no formulas, no "trademark" gestures, no loose edges, no incomplete or
troubling transitions, no aggressively tricky details, no straining after effect, no
imposition of an overriding theory or geometry, nothing that is not fully conceptualized
and realized. The originality of his solutions never involves discomfort or sublimation on
the part of the user. Identifying characteristics are subtle and generic: a tightly
organized and consistently inventive plan unites the client's needs and the qualities of
the site with a dedicated belief in structure and materials; an equally tight synthesis of
means and ends infuses practical solutions with profound sensuous satisfactions. His
houses "live" in nature, and the people who live in his houses are eager to tell
you how the way they live in them has changed their lives - an idea that architects once
cherished and have now largely abandoned. Writing in the British journal, The
Architectural Review, in 1981, Peter Cook observed, "In Sverre Fehn we have a
believing architect, and we ignore his quiet and lyrical approach to modern architecture
at our peril." These buildings are a continuing search for meaning and authenticity.
There is not an abstract exercise, ordinary scheme, or false bravura gesture in the lot.
This is basic architecture, reinvented.
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