Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity
The Henie Onstad collection departs from an MA seminar in the fall 2024 where ten master students catalogue the building and its archives in preparation for a forthcoming book and the provenance exhibition at the Henie Onstad Art Center in 2027. Henie Onstad Art Center is a partner in the project.
People involved
This seminar explores the full material provenance of the Henie Onstad Art Centre (HOK), located at Høvikodden in Bærum, including building materials, technical infrastructure, furniture, display systems, lighting, maintenance systems, as well as the thousands of art works that has been on display across the decades. By thorough investigations of the archives at HOK and at other locations, and through on-site surveys of the building, the students will excavate the sourcing, ownership history, production history, economy, usage and alteration records of the components, materials and artworks. By constructing an alternative history of the building,this seminar challenges the way we understand and value-assess buildings, and might change the way we transform them for the future. In addition, the seminar aims to provide scenarios for HOKs future development.
Henie Onstad Art Centre was inaugurated in 1968 and designed by the young architects Jon Eikvar and Svein-Erik Engebretsen. It was radical of its time, both in terms of its curatorial ideas and its innovative architecture. Initiated and funded by the figure skater and Hollywood movie star Sonia Henie and her husband, the shipowner Niels Onstad, HOK represented a state-of-the-art cultural institution much inspired by Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside of Copenhagen. Based on the personal relationships of HOK’s director Ole Henrik Moe with people like Pontus Hultén, Willem Sandberg and Knut W. Jensen, the new center aimed for a new definition of art, showcasing contemporary music, dance, performance, film and photography alongside paintings, drawings and sculpture, engaging its visitors in new ways. Eikvar and Engebretsen, recent graduates from Statens Arkitektkurs at Statens Håndverk- og Kunstindustriskole (later Oslo School of Architecture) and employees at Nils Holter’s studio, won the competition in 1965 with an innovative scheme influenced by ideas that was circulating at the time. The project development and the building process progressed in line with the radical museum concept, including experimentation with new materials, 1:1 mock-ups, «electronic» site-management and more. Since 1968, the building had been expanded, altered and restored several times, and the art center has gained reputation as one of the leading art institutions in Scandinavia.
From the book: Sonie Henie, henne form, Henie Onstad Art Centre 2021. Editor: Gunhild Varvin
In the Norwegian context, the radical project that arose at Høvikodden in 1968, initiated and financed by Sonja Henie and Niels Onstad, was a completely new type of art institution. Moderna Museet, under the innovative directorship of Pontus Hultén, Louisiana Kunstmuseum and its owner-director Knut W. Jensen, and Stedelijk museum under the influential Willem Sandberg were all role models for a new kind of institution that Henie Onstad’s director, Ole-Henrik Moe, chose to call “det totale museum”.
The architecture of the art centre, which was conceived by the young architects Jon Eikvar (1933–) and Svein-Erik Engebretsen (1933–), inscribed itself into the artistic project through an open relationship with its surroundings, a flexible spatial organisation, an unconventional form and innovative material experiments. The curatorial and museological precursors to the Høvikodden art centre are well known and thoroughly documented, but its architectural ancestry have been explored to a much lesser degree.[ii] Uncovering the ideas that formed the basis for the architects’ submission to the design competition requires a deep dig into the archives, and identifying the origins of the art centre’s architecture requires knowledge about the international discourse that unfolded within architecture towards the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s.
