Mari Lending

Project Leader

Mari Lending is a professor of architectural theory and history at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and a founding member of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies). Among her books are Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton University Press, 2017); with Peter Zumthor, A Feeling of History (Scheidegger & Spiess, 2018); with Erik Langdalen, Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives (Lars Müller Publishers, 2021); and Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge, with Tim Anstey (Hatje Cantz, 2023). She is the director of the international research project Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity, and the president of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN). Lending is presently working on a project called Parthenon Provenances and the monograph Auctioning Architecture.

Related content

Architectural Provenance, Warburg Institute, London
Since the 1780s, provenance has been used to describe the origins, authorship, ownership and legitimacy of movable objects such as artworks, manuscripts, ethnographica and archaeological relics. Transposed into architecture, provenance reveals new complexities in the social and material lives of buildings and architectural artefacts, while reframing questions of movement, migration and circulation. With provenance as a lens, both ownership and authorship in architecture transform: ownership may expand beyond the possession of the object itself while the idea of the singular author splinters in the face of truly multi-authored objects.
Architectural provenance grasps situated details that tie into global networks of production, transaction and transportation; any cut into time will show architecture performing in all sorts of states between complex origins and uncertain destinations. Provenance is not only a way of stabilizing meaning but a means for tracing complications, ruptures, and the multi-temporal layers of architectural work. By zooming in on specific moments of possession, exchange and crises, provenance in architecture may provide other ways of understanding architecture as history as well as the present and future of the built world. Provenance allows us to see buildings, fragments, artefacts, and even landscapes not as static objects with fixed boundaries, but as flexible, networked, and co-authored entities with rich cultural biographies and unexpected afterlives.
This one-day conference brings together art and architectural historians from Europe and the US to discuss architectural provenance across genres, material, place and time. It is organized by Professor Mari Lending, director of the international research project Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity, and fellow at the Warburg Institute.
10:00
Welcome: Bill Sherman, Director of the Warburg Institute
Introduction: Mari Lending
Victor Plahte Tschudi (Oslo School of Architecture and Design/AHO): Sack of Rome: Privileges and plagiarism of Serlio’s Terzo libro
Tim Anstey (AHO): Anne Clifford: Provenance and perambulation
Wallis Miller (University of Kentucky): The construction of provenance in Schinkel's Museums
Mari Lending (AHO): Vita Sackville-West: Auctions on the premises
Lunch break
14:00
Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto): Provenance, Cost, Labour
Timothy Hyde (Massachusetts Institute of Technology/MIT)): The inheritance of American Architecture
Matthew Mullane (Radboud University): Chasing a monster around the world: Itō Chūta's theory of architectural substitution
Uwe Fleckner (University of Hamburg): Warburg’s Ellipse. Provenance and afterlife of an architectural-intellectual motif
Conference
Oct 31—31, 2025
Read more about Architectural Provenance, Warburg Institute, London
Portal Propagations, Doctoral Defense
Nick Walkley defended his PhD thesis Portal Propagations: Reproduction, Reception, and Rediscovery in the Life of the Urnes Portal, Friday March 7, 2025. In the morning, Nick presented the trial lecture: “The significance of the portal and its ornamentation in Romanesque architecture”. This is the first completed PhD dissertation in Provenance Projected, and we all warmly congratulate Nick with his wonderful work and performance and thank the committee for brilliant criticism and an elevated discussion.
Adjudication committee: Dr. Olivia Horsfall Turner, Chief Curator, Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Collections, London; Professor Helge Jordheim, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) at the University of Oslo, and Professor Jonny Aspen, AHO.
Advisor: Mari Lending
Co-Advisor: Albena Yaneva
PhD defense
Mar 7—7, 2025
Read more about Portal Propagations, Doctoral Defense
Fehn Among Others. Domkirkeodden, Hamar
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.
Symposium
Oct 9, 2024
Read more about Fehn Among Others. Domkirkeodden, Hamar
AaltoSiilo, Oulu
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen are giving the double keynote lecture “Values: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity” at the three-days European Commission Visit in Oulu, Finland, part of the EU program Living Spaces – Cities and regions shaping the built environment for everyone, followed by the Aaltosiilo Festival 2024: “The Post-Industral Dance”, on Saturday September 15.
Center stage is the silo building designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto, and completed in 1931. In 2020, Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation bought the obsolete, iconic concrete wood chip silo. The AaltoSiilo is presently being restored and reinvented by Skene Catling de la Pena Studio for a post-industrial era, redefining materiality for the 21st century and the role of industrial heritage in memory, shaping place and cultural identity.
Conference
Sep 11—14, 2024
Read more about AaltoSiilo, Oulu
Warburg Models, AA London
Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive opened at the Architectural Association on 18th January 2024. Here the Warburg models moved from the powerful elliptical space that had characterized the heart of the Warburg Institute’s 1920s home in Hamburg into the linear space of the Architectural Association gallery, a room not dissimilar in its proportions to that of the Institute’s first research space in Thames House in London. Aspects of the Hamburg display moved with the models, and the gallery in London presented hyper-detailed portraits of the display panels used in the elliptical space of the Warburg-Haus presented the archive material and architectural drawings on which the Warburg Models project was based. In London the Warburg Models were set in the context of an equally stunning exhibit on the history of the AA’s own lantern-slide collection, assembled during the 1890s. Bespoke furniture commissioned for the exhibition in London, and inspired by the designs developed for the Warburg Models exhibition at Blaker (2021), presented facsimile material for both exhibitions.
Exhibition
Jan 18—Mar 7, 2024
Read more about Warburg Models, AA London
Warburg Models, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg is the second exhibition in a sequence of three editions, beginning with Warburg Models at Blaker, Guttormgaards Arkiv, outside Oslo in May 2021 and ending with Warburg Models: Institutes and Archives, at the Architectural Association, London (18 January– 7 March 2024).
Each model in the exhibition presents an architectural project that was seminal for the intellectual development of Aby Warburg himself, for the individuals who curated his legacy (particularly Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing), and for the conceptualisation of Warburg’s famous library. The models are constructed at 1:75 scale and perform as monochrome sculptures suggesting the centrality of colour to the systems of orientation and organization that were developed for the library. Fulfilling Warburg’s desire to create a library in which individual books could be relocated into differing constellations depending on changing lines of research interest, Saxl and Bing adopted a system of categories, identified by single letters, matched by fourteen colours spread across the palette from burnt umber to near white and from sangria to aquamarine. In their flexible cataloguing system each volume in the Warburg collection, regardless of provenance, carried colour strips on its spine, allowing its potential allocation to a complex series of thematic constellations. The Warburg Models each take one of these colours as a datum, producing hyper-detailed descriptions, from building structure and architectural detail to chairs and book lamps, in various materials sprayed with a single hue.
Staged in the hallway and in the iconic Lese- und Vortragssaal at the Warburg-Haus, the models are displayed on plinths inspired by Warburg and Saxl’s exhibition designs. Cloth-covered panels hang within the curved wall of bookshelves that surrounds the elliptical reading room, showing archival material pertaining to this Warburgian architecture, a reinscription of the system originally used to display Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge is the result of an AHO Architectural graduate seminar run during 2020 and 2021, taught by Tim Anstey and Mari Lending.

Exhibition
Nov 30, 2023
Read more about Warburg Models, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge
Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture, a focus that was at once intellectual, visceral, historical, and contemporary. As well as exploring how architecture had shaped systems of cultural orientation in the past, Warburg and his followers were involved a continual process of architectural commissioning in the present. Between 1923 and 1958 designs were initiated for a collection of buildings, interiors, and exhibitions, as the Warburg Library moved through a series of homes, first in Hamburg and then in London. All these projects provided opportunities for expressing the relationship between architecture, intellectual order, and memory.
Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture, portraying six building projects from archival material. Detailed architectural models made by students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and accompanying contributions from Dag Erik Elgin, Uwe Fleckner, Elizabeth Sears, Bill Sherman, and Claudia Wedepohl, show how architectural repetition, reinscription, and movement shaped a seminal research institution.
“The buildings that housed Aby Warburg’s library were designed by some of the most prominent Modernists, and employed the latest in communication and information techniques. This original and beautiful book reconstructs the architectural journey of the Warburg Institute, adding a new dimension to the disciplinary insights developed there: the vehicular migration of images across time and place.”
Caroline van Eck
Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge
Book
Published Nov 1, 2023
Read more about Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge
Sverre Fehn og Bronsealderen
Article
Published Sep 15, 2023
Read more about Sverre Fehn og Bronsealderen
Transformation in Practice: Centralteateret
The studio will work with the transformation of Centralteateret in the centre of Oslo. The theatre is a cultural building of complex provenance, making it an ideal case study for working with existing buildings. The first iteration of Centralteateret dates back to the late 18th century, and the theatre has since gone through several transformations. Unique to Centralteateret, these layers are still visibly intact to reveal the rich history embedded in the building's fabric. The different areas share a near undisturbed patina. These qualities should be cultivated rather than sanitised in future scenarios.
A theatre is a machine for illusion and storytelling, where the architecture is working hard to signify and symbolise, flatter, and seduce. The studio will study these aspects of the building to look for ways to improve the existing condition. The studio will propose projects transforming the theatre through a surgical analysis of the many spaces and components of the building. The studio's output will be a series of interventions, provocations and extensions that balance the need to preserve the existing condition with the building's potential for future use.
The studio will be organised into three parts:
Survey: The studio will lend considerable attention to understanding the building through on site investigations to study the interwoven layers of theatrical architecture from different historical periods. Surveys will quantify physical properties and the qualified values such as significance, symbolism, and tradition. Recordings will document the intersection between historical periods to understand the evolution of architectural thinking about a particular typology.
Artefact: The survey will be the foundation for the artefact, a large-scale material model that starts the inverted design process from fragment to building. The model is a physical and material manifestation of an essential component or junction found in your survey, translated into a three-dimensional piece at a detailed scale. This 'hot-spot' is a free-standing bricolage of materials that suggests something more than the sum of its parts. The original is not a prescriptive tool but the starting point for new designs and the representation of new artefacts.
Proposal: Students will work iteratively to find an appropriate and feasible way of constructing an architectural project that has contemporary relevance and engages with the existing building. Building on close observations of the context, students will develop their own architectural and technical agenda (an architectural intervention, a strategy for maintenance, a performance or a methodology to improve the use of the building based on an understanding of current challenges).
Projects will answer to the specifics of the building whilst being relevant to the broader discourse on the future of this type of building. The architectural proposal will be developed through large-scale material models, both analogue and digital, and architectural drawings. Craft will inform contemporary construction methods and material exploration by learning from what has already been built.

Course
Fall 2022
Read more about Transformation in Practice: Centralteateret
Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives
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.
Book
Published May 6, 2021
Read more about Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives
Warburg Models at Blaker
Architecture, interiors and technological systems were crucial for how Aby Warburg and his followers interrogated culture. In Warburg’s native Hamburg a purpose designed building, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, was completed in 1926 to accommodate his remarkable library and to disseminate the ideas it generated. In the same year a transformation was initiated to create a Planetarium for Hamburg in a disused water tower, a project that would demonstrate Warburg’s radical theories about how travelling images carried fragments of antique reality into modernity. When the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933, this fascination with architectural organisation continued through projects designed by the avant-garde architectural group Tecton to house the institute and its directors during the 1930s, in the creation of successful exhibitions during the 1940s and in the construction of the library’s present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in the 1950s.
Through six models at 1:75 scale, the exhibition shows how the Warburg scholars projected a tie between their own occupancy of architectural space and their shared ideas about intellectual order and cultural survival. The models are colour coded with the Modernist palette of colours used by the Warburg Institute to organise its collection of books according to “the rule of the good neighbour”. Each model emphasizes a certain architectural aspect of the building portrayed. The Warburg models will be shown in Blaker outside Oslo, Hamburg, London, and New York (2021–24).
The exhibition is part of the research project Re-inscribing the Warburg Institute at OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies), AHO. The graduate seminar Warburg Models is conducted by professors Tim Anstey and Mari Lending. The models are built by Pernille Ahlgren, Christian Berg, Amalie Elvegård, Nora Kilstad, Anne Lise Ladegård, Pål Sanchez-Paredes, Silje Seim, Cathrine Sundem, Maximilian Svendsen, Karina Tang, and Mara Trübenbach.
Exhibition
May 1—30, 2021
Read more about Warburg Models at Blaker
Demolition, Disappearance, Recurrence: Interludes in Architectural History
The destructions of Maison du Peuple (Brussels, Belgium) and Militærhospitalet (Oslo, Norway) were a means to an end for 1960s progress. Development plans once assumed their disposal, but international dissent turned the quick demolitions into systematic deconstructions. Hard-fought battles between those wishing to demolish and those hoping to preserve lead to the partial deconstruction, decades-long storage, and ex-situ spoliation of the buildings. Material disappearance catalysed the accumulation of documentation; archives related to Maison du Peuple and Militærhospitalet are preoccupied with the interlude between demolition and reconstruction. If architectural history tends to recount the motivation and conception of buildings, then this thesis aims to detail their post-demolition afterlives. Demolition is already integral to architecture and implicit in its history, but scholars have repeatedly noted its near absence in architectural history. By asking how rather than why these buildings were demolished, this thesis shifts focus from conception to reception, from beginning to end, and from author to owners.
PhD
Read more about Demolition, Disappearance, Recurrence: Interludes in Architectural History
Portal Propagations. Reproduction, Reception, and Reconstruction in the Life of the Urnes Portal
The Urnes Portal stands preserved seemingly frozen in time as world heritage, as part of a 12th century stave church overlooking the Luster fjord on the Norwegian west coast. Yet, the portal and other spoliated carvings that are reused in the building once formed the entrance of an earlier 11th century church and continue to grow in iconicity through their perpetually reproduced image. As a preservational paradox, 19th century recordings made as an act of safeguarding also represent a point of provenience in the making of a monument that has spawned its further reproduction through painting, drawings, photography, plaster casts, carvings, to contemporary tattoos and commercial packaging. But what effect does this prolific reproduction have on the portal, the monument as a whole, and the way it is read through its extended image? Portal Propagations examines how the Urnes Portal has been reproduced, received, and reinvented over time forming many shoots of new life as part of its overall reach.
Portal Propagations also turns a glance towards the future. Through interaction with the working practices of Factum Foundation, this dissertation examines the changing techniques of reproduction. Digital technologies are enhancing the process, allowing for higher fidelity and closer objective proximity to the original. The thesis looks into how such processes are expanding a possible spectrum of reproductive authorship within a copy-creation dichotomy, and how yet new techniques might be used to reconstruct and re-explore the original architectural situation of the Urnes Portal as an extension of the scholarly attempts that have strived to reconstruct the lost 11th century church.
Through the scrutiny of a single artefact, Portal Propagations examines how monuments are made, how they continue to grow through their circulated images, and how changing attitudes to reproductions can offer a refreshed view of originality.
PhD
Read more about Portal Propagations. Reproduction, Reception, and Reconstruction in the Life of the Urnes Portal
Resonance and Reverberation: Broadcasting Architecture
In 2020, the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK sold its properties at Marienlyst to developer Ferd for 3.75 bill NOK who plans on transforming one of Norway’s most important nation-building institutions into a private development project. The original broadcasting building, Kringkastingshuset, was designed by architect Nils Holter (1899–1995), after a 1935 competition. It was at the time a completely new building typology and given the novelty of broadcasting technology, Holter’s task was to plan for the unforeseen demands of a new media and its spatial requirements. Broadcasting buildings were machines whose exact purpose was yet to be fully understood, and Kringkastingshuset’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that Holter and his client had the foresight to plan the NRK site to give a flexible framework for a public institution in growth.Holter's practice would continue working with NRK for nearly half a century, extending and reorganizing the original building as well as adding additional buildings in a kind of open work-style, according to a rapidly changing technology.
The history of the broadcasting building as recounted in this dissertation is being pieced together from thousands of letters, reports, contracts, and parliamentary bills preserved in the archives of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, and previously unexplored by architectural historians. Marienlyst is an important work of monumental public architecture and a highly complex piece of technical infrastructure. The project has never had a completion date but remained in a state of flux. In this way, an inherent incompleteness is directly linked to its longevity. The thesis is about one of the most radical building typologies of the 20th century, at the moment when it is declared obsolete.
PhD
Read more about Resonance and Reverberation: Broadcasting Architecture