Horizon, artefact, nature - architect Sverre Fehn designs house in Bamle, Norway - Norway: Special Issue

Architectural Review, The, August, 1996 by Henry Miles

This house by Sverre Fehn in the southern Oslo Fjord takes further his fascination with the interactions of nature and artefact, humanity and the universe in a tour de force of construction and spatial elegance.

Sverre Fehn is the Grand Old Man of Norwegian architecture(1): every single building of his comparatively small oeuvre is a reflection on the relationships of humanity to nature or history, of the individual to society. Fehn's Villa Busk at Bamle is the most recent in a series of buildings that starts with the notion of providing people with platforms from which to contemplate the natural world. Others include the Glacier Museum at Fjaerdal (AR April 1993, p61), the contemplative platform in its most literal form, and the two Bodtker houses (AR February 1986, p57). As UIf Gronvold remarked, the houses touch on Fehn's preoccupation with the horizon and the mythical nature of the north: 'We can still experience the horizon encircling us as the outer limit of the world. Beyond the horizon lies the unknown, that which we do not see. In sparsely populated Norway, there is a strong feeling that adventure lies hidden behind the mountains. The farms are often distant from each other, and when you leave the farm, you disappear into the forest'.(2) Fehn believes that the voyages of the Renaissance, and all subsequent endeavours have eroded the primitive and perhaps essential relationship of humankind to nature: for now instead of being comfortingly enclosed in the vault of the sky with its limit at the horizon, we are alone in infinite space. Almost the whole of Fehn's work is intended to give us some reassurance that the impressions and emotions of our ancestors (even the very earliest ones) are still of great importance to our psyches, and that they can be re-evoked today.

The Bodtker houses are set on the flanks of Holmenkollen, Oslo's favourite mountain, and enjoy a wooded site with marvellous views of the city, harbour and fjord below. The Villa Busk is down on the west side of the fjord, where the other coast is lost over the horizon. The site, like that of the Bodtker houses, is rocky and wooded and slopes down towards the sea, but it is much less high up, on a ridge that runs parallel to a shallow valley gently shaped millions of years ago by a tongue of ice.

The house is almost Miesian in its planning, taking its alignment from the ridge and fundamentally describing a perfect rectangle to complement it. But there is a cross axis which starts on the highest ground with the pergola of the entrance and continues across the rectangle, and a bridge, to end in a column of small rooms that stands in the valley as an observation tower (and a means of getting from the level of the entrance and main rectangle to the bottom of the valley). The rectangle on its concrete platform (which contains cellars) has a lateral glass and timber circulation spine which runs along the whole uphill side as a marvellous uninterrupted gallery made in wood and glass, with views of the forest striated by wooden Venetian blinds. To the right of the entrance, and slightly uphill, is the main sitting room; to the left is the long thin kitchen, then the dining room. Beyond is an open court (along which the glazed spine passes) to reach the next part of the house, where there is the main bedroom and the lavish bathing arrangements. The spine loses its glass and stretches out onto the ridge at each end. All along its length, there is such an intimate contact with the countryside that at first, the long south-east (opposite) side seems cruelly deprived of access to the oblique views down the valley and the sea.

The grey vertically boarded in-situ concrete wall rises as a sheer artefact from the irregular rocky ridge to a clerestory, above which the timber members of the roof spring to carry the shallow slate roof. Into the walls of the internal spaces are cut small square holes and thin vertical slots which descend from clerestory level carefully to frame glimpsed views. In contrast, there is a sense of release and freedom at the open court in the middle of the rectangle: a true horizon-viewing platform. There is of course a completely different sensation of horizon from the gazebo at the top of the tower. And elsewhere, for the whole house has been planned with much delicacy to relate you to nature in as many different ways as Fehn deems suitable - and these are far more numerous and touching than you could have imagined for yourself.

Throughout, there is a continuous sense of the elemental, of resonance with inherited feeling, of understanding the past and nature. But never a moment in which the architect slips over into sentimentality or obvious quotation. The house responds to nature and tradition without compromise, yet with gentleness and great sensitivity. It is a masterwork that adds to the richness of Modernism.

1 A title that must be shared with Kjell Lund, who has made some of the most rigorous yet humanly sympathetic architecture for modern building programmes in the country since the War - for instance the VG corner (AR June 1995). At the same time Lund has made some of the most powerful evocations of the numinous (see for instance this issue p66).