Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity
The Sverre Fehn collection brings together material and research conducted on the oeuvre of former AHO professor and Pritzker Prize laureate Sverre Fehn. Marking his centennial in 2024 with a master seminar, the international symposium Fehn Among Others and the exhibition Professor Sverre Fehn, the provenance group aims to shed new light on his architectural production. The collections assembles publications, events and teaching initiatives from the recent years.
People involved
Sverre Fehn (1924–2009) is often depicted as a solitary figure, an auteur whose musings on architecture in the landscape witness a deep personal connection with the natural world, but often remain silent about the people that populate it. As the first Scandinavian architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, he is often portrayed as a quintessentially Norwegian and Nordic architect. But his conceptual world was informed by a perpetual interest in the international discourse. Fehn’s work is intimately connected with the architects he nurtured friendships with, and the foreign locales that fascinated him. When asked in an interview in 1995, in the last year of his 24-year tenure as a professor at AHO, what was most important aspect of the school to maintain, he replied, “International contact.”
Now, at the centennial of his birth, it is time to trace the contexts that informed his work. This year’s Fehn symposium is devoted to a surprisingly overlooked facet of his oeuvre: its collaborative dimension and the international contacts that he nurtured throughout his life. Whether through the close friendship he maintained with Jean Prouvé or his pivotal rapport with John Hejduk in New York after they met in 1977, Fehn’s international orientation was an essential aspect of the evolution of his work. The presentations at the Fehn symposium 2024 are archive-based, presenting new facts and interpretations on Fehn’s work.
Sverre Fehn was born in Kongsberg on August 14, 1924. He was, and still is, Norway's most famous architect, nationally and internationally. The Oslo School of Architecture and Design celebrates the Fehn centennial with a series of events in collaboration with the National Museum and the journal Arkitektur.
Tuesday October 1 at 16:00, the centennial exhibition "Professor Sverre Fehn" opens at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). The exhibition sheds light on Fehn's work as rector and teacher at AHO through a wealth of new archival material, curated by assistant professor Nicholas Coates at AHO.
Rector Irene Alma Lønne and University Lecturer Nicholas Coates at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design will give presentations at the opening.
About the exhibition:
Sverre Fehn Fehn was a legendary teacher and lecturer, at home and abroad, and a substantial part of his prolific career took place from the studios, auditorium, board room and corridors of the school, among students and colleagues. When asked in an interview in 1995, in the last year of his 24-year tenure as a professor at AHO, what was most important aspect of the school to maintain, he replied: “International contact”.
The exhibition “Professor Sverre Fehn” brings out key documents, sketches, correspondence, and other artifacts that deepen our understanding of his well-known works and supplement the established narratives that have been documented and disseminated earlier. Professor Sverre Fehnpresents a lesser-known side of Fehn’s work, outlining the national, international and institutional horizon of his production, as a teacher and lecturer.
The exhibition builds upon findings from the spring 2024 seminar Authoring Architecture: Fehn 100 run by Thomas McQuillan, and is curated by Nicholas Coates with the assistance of Charlotte Baumgartner, Eskil Buskov Selmer, Tara Eliassen Kongsvik, and Valieriia Loboda.
AHO thanks the National Museum and NRK for granting access to their archives and providing material for this exhibition.
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen present the guest lecture“Geopolitics and Aggregates. The Nordic Pavilion, Venice” at GSD, Harvard University, April 14 2024.
Mari Lending’s «’Boret store hull i uerstattelig oldsak’: Sverre Fehn og bronsealderen» appeared in Tid og historie – et festskrift for Gro Bjørnerud Mo. Ed. Kjerstin Aukrust og Geir Uvsløkk (Oslo: Novus forlag, 2023).
The Fehn symposium 2023 at Domkirkeodden, Hamar, was organized by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen.
PROGRAM
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen organized the symposium The Nordic Pavilion: Geopolitics in MiniatureConference, Venice 29–30 September 2022. The conference was sponsored by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and took place at IUAV´s Palazzo Badoer.
The Nordic Pavilion turns 60 this year, and it is 70 years since the establishment of the Nordic Council. Sverre Fehn’s masterpiece in the Venetian Giardini was conceived and built in a cold war climate, against the backdrop of friendships and animosities, power play and diplomacy. The detours and disappointments, the successes and failures of the Venice affair make a prism in miniature to understand the mindset and conflicting ambitions of the Nordic countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Recent geopolitical developments and the Nordic NATO debates bring a renewed topicality to the Nordic postwar cooperation in Venice.
Based on AHO professors Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen’s book Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives (Pax/Lars Müller, 2021), and generously supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Oslo, the symposium The Nordic Pavilion: Geopolitics in Miniature opened with a reception in the pavilion with welcoming words by Martin Andestad from the Norwegian Embassy in Rome, Benno Albrecht, the dean of UIAV, Irene Lønne, the dean of AHO.
To contextualize their micro-historical account on the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion, and the extensive cast involved in its making, Lending and Langdalen brought together colleagues from across the world to illuminate Nordic, postwar geopolitics with an eye to present political debates. In the wonderful Tafuri room in UIAV’s Palazzo Badoer, Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen (AHO), Iver Neumann (Fridtjof Nansens institutt, Oslo), Léa-Catherine Szacka (University of Manchester), Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale University), Helena Mattson (KTH, Stockholm), Markus Lähteenmäki (University of Helsinki), Tom Avermaete (ETH Zürich), Antonello Alici (Università Politecnica, Ancona), Adrian Forty (Bartlett, London), and Dag Erik Elgin (artist, Oslo), discussed topics spanning from The Nordic states between the US and the USSR, The Geopolitics of Nature and The Biennale and the Nation, to Soviet in Postwar Venice and Nordic Geopolitics beyond Europe, shedding new light on a familiar period in European architecture.
Mari Lending presents the lecture «The historicity of a concrete object: Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice» for the 20th Century Society at AHO, August 25 2022.
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen present the keynote lecture “Voices from the archives. Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice” at ATTR: Authoritative Texts and Their Receptions’s international conference Collections, Archives & Libraries, Deichman Library, Oslo June 9 2022.
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen present the guest lecture “Archiving Architecture” at the University of Manchester, May 26 2022.
Mari Lending presents the guest lecture “The Historicity of a Concrete Object. Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice” in the Documenta lecture series, University of Kassel, May 18 2022.
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen present the keynote lecture «The Historicity of a Concrete Object: Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice» at the annual conference Norsk arkitektur og arkitektonisk kultur 1950–1970, organized by Espen Johnsen, University of Oslo March 10–11 2022.
Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece in postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition in 1958 and the building was inaugurated in 1962. Through six decades the beloved structure has been mired in phenomenology, poetry, and the personal memory of the select. Looking at the archives, a very different story emerges.
In minute detail, this book presents the history of the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion; spanning from the geopolitical context in an increasingly tense cold war atmosphere, to the aggregates in the concrete of the audacious roof construction, and to the iconic trees, many of which died already before the second exhibition in 1964.
Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives documents the vast cast involved in the making of the Nordic Pavilion, spanning from kings, prime ministers, bureaucrats, ambassadors, museum directors, architects, and a myriad of artists’ associations, to Venetian dignitaries, engineers, gardeners, lawyers, and plumbers. The pavilion was conceived and built against the backdrop of friendships and animosities, powerplay and diplomacy. The detours and disappointments, the successes and failures of the Venice affair make a prism in miniature to understand the mindset and conflicting ambitions of the Nordic countries in the 1950s and 60s. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished images, among them many photographs taken by Fehn himself, the archival evidence also sheds new light on one of the great Nordic architects of the recent past.
The last part of the book presents short contributions on various aspects of Fehn’s iconic structure by architects and artists: Daniela Moderini, Helen Dorey, Adrian Forty, John Ochsendorf, Pedram Ghelichi, María Dolores Sánchez-Moya, Camille Norment, Gro Bonesmo, and João Doria de Souza.
As the Venice Biennale and the planned book launch was cancelled due to the pandemic, Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen first presented Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives (Zurich: Lars Müller/Oslo: Pax) in Beatriz Colomina’s Media&Modernity series at Princeton School of Architecture, April 6 2021 with the lecture «The Nordic Pavilion in Venice: An Intra-Canonical Outlook». Commentator: Adrian Forty.
