Civilisation in the North - architecture in Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Peter Davey

Norway could scarcely be said to have ever been in the forefront of architectural fashion nor to have generated a school of its own. But there is much to learn about the nature of materials and the relationships of buildings to context and to society by studying the architecture of one of the world's most northerly countries.

This issue paints a false picture of Norwegian architecture, for with the exception of Niels Torp's Christianiaqvartal (p70), there is no urban work. Yet Oslo (and to a lesser extent some of the other Norwegian cities) is a model of what a town should be. Along its main street, Karl Johans gate,(1) all the main institutions of civilised life are laid out, from the Neo-Classical palace in the west to the Rundbogenstil parliament building in the east. Between the two are the National Theatre (ripe Biedermeier Classicism) the University (by Schinkel),(2) the finest nineteenth-century shops and hotel.(3) Down a cross street to the south can be glimpsed the Town Hall, a late and rather stripped example of National Romanticism in brick with granite embellishments;(4) it looks down the harbour at the end of Oslo fjord in celebration of the nation's relationship to the sea. Further to the east along the Karl Johan axis is the market square with the cathedral and great traditional department store; down the hill towards the main railway station is the seventeenth-century gridded part of the city with the business quarter and the national bank.(5)

This humanist and rational model of civilised life is precise and elegant, but perhaps no more so than that of any other early predominantly nineteenth-century capital, Helsinki, say, or Edinburgh. But in complete contrast to the latter city, fine new architecture continues to be built. The city's architects have not been overwhelmed by the past, but on the whole(6) add to it creatively and with sympathy.

Their contributions are wide ranging. At one end of the spectrum is the gentle rigour of Lund & Slaatto's Verdens Gang corner (AR June 1995, p46) which drops into the dense fabric north of Karl Johan with grace but without any sense of having to ape the past (the contrast with Edinburgh is excruciating, see for instance AR July 1996, p23). At the other end of the scale is Aker Brygge (AR August 1990), one of the finest inner-city developments built anywhere in this century. It has been created on the site of an old shipbuilding yard at the head of the fjord, just to the west of the Town Hall opposite the Akershus (the castle round which the city grew up). Masterplanned by Niels Torp, Aker Brygge contains the essential ingredients of proper city life: dwelling, work, leisure, mixed in intimate contact in a structure that evokes all the tropes of traditional urban space ranging from the square to the alley. It can be faulted on stylistic grounds,(7) but it works at every human level and creatively connects with the beautiful armature of the nineteenth-century city.

The precise and humane quality of Oslo has precedent in some of the rural architecture, particularly in the farms of central Norway,(8) which intimately relate to the landscapes in which they are set, while making built paradigms of dignified human life lived in close contact with nature. From such precedents is derived the Norwegian love of the individual building set in more-or-less wild landscape that most of the work shown in this issue exemplifies. These re-analyses of the relationship of humanity to nature are immensely important for the rest of the developed world, and Norway (which has the lowest population density in Europe) is an appropriate test-bed for such experiments.

But the Norwegian affinity for the countryside has a much more unhappy aspect. Judged on a per capita measure, Norway is one of the richest countries in the world because of its oil wealth. And sometimes it looks like it. When you fly into any of the country's airports, the chief impression is of California transported to the north. There is the same prodigality with land: the suburbs explode into the wilderness like super-charged fungi; the forests are tamed; the fells and rivers made into ornamental backdrops to suburban life. This is disgusting, and will reap its own reward as apparently limitless resources are eroded.

In the best Norwegian architecture there is a complete rejection of these values. There is a gritty integrity derived from two millennia living on the edge of a harsh natural world that accepts people only if they know how to cope with extremes and have a very clear understanding of the potential of materials. This understanding of the relationship of humanity to nature covers a spectrum that ranges from the precision of the cities to the clarity of the cottages (p44).

Christian Norberg-Schulz has remarked that 'Norway is the most "difficult" of the Nordic lands with respect to nature'.(9) He argues that Norway's topography is 'the most complex and ... dramatic in the North'. The long mountain mass is deeply penetrated by the fjords of the west coast and shelters the mysterious dark forests and golden valleys of the eastern part of the country. Denmark, Sweden and Finland are mostly flat. Norway has every variation that God and geology can make to the earth's surface. Norberg-Schulz is convinced that 'construction must be emphasised [in Norway] ... precisely because the environment is so indefinite ... Norwegian architecture has ... its origin in the combination of stave and log construction ... in skeletal and massive structures ... Norwegian tradition can be traced from medieval stave churches through folk architecture, National Romanticism's dragon style, Functionalism's concrete skeletons to Fehn's characteristic symbiosis of wood and masonry'(p40).(10)