Trees and horizons: the architecture of Sverre Fehn

Originally published in AR August 1981, this piece was republished online in August 2021

Much architecture that has engaged our attention in the last few years shares a sense of brittleness. Whether it has been in the games played with the unknown: the extension of territory by way of new technologies: with the seeming impossibility of glass-edged glass, the totally conditioned environment, the depersonalised membrane, the silver space, or a different brittleness which lies in the cynicism with which we now shy away from Modernism and prefer games that can be played upon some quotation from the past-that can be inverted, quoted back on itself and so on-a sense of backchat being more useful than a sense of history. So the recourse to eclecticism might be seen as the ultimate cynicism: rejecting stated values and valued models. Hours of (harmful) fun for all!

But what of the romantics, the believers, the dreamers of dreams, the architects of vision who demand of the parti only that it supports those dreams? They may well find the brittle chatter elsewhere to be an irritation, or suspect it to be a smoke screen for those who don’t really have any vision.

In Sverre Fehn we have a believing architect, and we ignore his quiet and lyrical approach to modern architecture at our peril. He is one of a small category in which we could include Alison and Peter Smithson, Jørn Utzon (since Sydney Opera House) and Sei-ichi Shirai (author of the Noa building in Tokyo), for whom the sensitivity of space is not just achieved by sharp impacts of form or by immediately identifiable figuration: but more by hints and tracks and mere wisps of line.

Nordic pavilion, Venice Biennale (1962)

Fehn's house at Nørkoping

Fehn was born and trained in Norway, and has worked almost exclusively in that country. Inrecent years he has become recognised as one of the two powerful influences upon young architects – the other being Christian Norburg-Schulz, a friend, contemporary, and fellow professor at the architecture school in Oslo. If Norburg­-Schulz’s reputation rests on his writings, then Fehn’s is as the most inventive as well as the most sensitive of designers – though the repeated comment is that he does not receive enough commissions for someone of his talent. These definitions exist, of course, in a quiet corner of Europe that has been consistently overshadowed by its neighbours. The Romantic Classicism of Sweden, that is just now receiving a revival of attention, was given rein in a country with  sophisticated tastes, though the subsequent Swedish attachment to social worthiness and ‘people’s’ architecture has reached a far more diabolic level of dullness than can be found anywhere in Norway. Finland – even before Aalto – was the repository of a far tougher architecture in its Baltic Jugendstil that combatted a tough climate with a witty formalism. In the end though, it has been both Germany and England that have by necessity created a back-bone for the cultural climate of Norway: for architectural studies had to be made in Germany until the mid 1930s and sections of Oslo remind one immediately of the fringes of Hamburg or Darmstadt. More recently, the association is with Britain: and at least 100 architectural students a year come here from Norway to study. English is the colloquial second language for everyone under 35, and Lasdun is probably better known than Johnson.

Both Fehn and Norburg-Schulz were among the first students of a remarkable figure in the mythology of Nordic modern architecture: Arne Korsmo. By all accounts he was a charismatic personality: with the ability to bring Le Corbusier and Mendelsohn out to Oslo, to insist on a special mysterious shade of blue for all his tile and paintwork, and to woo sceptical businessmen into houses of an international level of sophistication. As a rare act of homage, Fehn himself has just bought and moved into one of the most idiosyncratic of Korsmo’s works: a house with a long grand salon that deliberately refuses to open up its long south wall except in mysterious ways, and contains a whole archaeology of 1930s devices. There is no doubt that Fehn will renovate the house lovingly, just as he has cosseted the exhibits within one of the galleries of the historical museum of Oslo that he recently renovated: each small relic is seen as a part of both a theatrical presentation and as a miniature piece of architecture in its own right, just as in certain Japanese gardens.

Bødtker house

His recognition of many phenomena that are not always highly regarded by architects can be sensed in his writings: ‘The tree is a wonderful plant. It contains by nature a strong and magnificent structure. Each species of tree has been given its own distinctive form. There is a whole world of expressional difference between an oak and a spruce. The plants’ dramatic meeting between the sky and the earth is, however, common for them both. It is in the point of intersection, the horizon, that the tree gathers all its strength, reaches its maximum constructive size. From that point in both directions towards minimal expression, it stretches its roots downwards into the darkness and its branches upwards towards the light… As opposed to stone, iron or glass, you can live with the tree next to your skin… The form given by the tree to our art of building is based on the straight line. It is the meeting with the sea (the water) which has given the material great beauty. The curve of the branch has become the line of the vessel. The suppleness of the board has conquered the waves… The huge ships cleared the landscape of its forests and drifted out to sea as large communities where men lived for years with the tree as partner-in-hand, from the wooden spoon and barrel to the hull and the mast’. (Fehn in Spazio e Societa June 1980.)

Here is an immediate recognition of the basic life supports of the Norwegian in history: yet there is little sense of provincialism in his buildings. Even the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale of 1962 takes the recognition of trees themselves as a reason for interacting rather than presenting some ‘woody’ atmosphere. Another basic commodity, with which we are too unconsciously familiar, becomes involved: ‘The story of the sun and the trees is the component and structure of the pavilion… the construction catches the sunbeams on the way to the ground, a creation of shadows, in the same way leaves make blue shadows on the green grass.’

Skådalen school for the deaf Oslo (1968-75)

If the pavilion is acquisitive and outstretches itself to the sky, the light and space, then only two years later another pavilion-like building is considering itself as carefully poised towards the light: ‘For the Nordic bear, Scandinavia is a country of summer. The cave is his winter palace. Within his dreams he knows nothing of snow.’

The Norrkøping house perceives this idea of the enclosure. The seasonal changes become a landscape controlled by the house as an instrument tuned by light and darkness, heat and cold. The interior room is a seasonal cave. The play of light changes the house from one room to nine. ‘In this house I met Palladio. He was tired, but all the same he spoke, “You have put all the utilities, bath, toilets and kitchen in the centre of the house. I made a large room out of it, you know, and the dome with the opening was without glass. When I planned the house it was a challenge towards nature – rain, air, heat and cold could fill the room”·
“And the four directions”, I replied.
‘‘Oh yes, you know”, and he became smaller, “at that time we were about to lose the horizon. You have opened the corners”, he stopped a little.
“You are on the way of loosing the globe”.
“Tell me more”. I said.
His voice began to weaken, but he whispered “All constructed thoughts are related to death.”
And then he was gone…’ (Fehn, in Signs and Insights Urbino 1979).

The formality is extremely well controlled, particularly in plan, though the bulk elements have a certain ‘thinness’ that is found in English work of the 1950s and early 1960s (and similarly weakens the Smithsons’ middle period). This characteristic is totally remedied in the Bødtker house that follows only a couple of years later. Not only is the figure dramatised – a main house pavilion sending off a jaunty arm, but the timber frames are playing a more heroic role: either as open definers of space (pergolas and balconies), or in the way that they clasp the solid part of the building.

National Museum of Fine Arts project (1972)

Of this series, one can only imagine the ultimate effect of a small plan that was produced for another house: a long cabin is simply divided, and opens out occasionally on diagonals (a trick used very effectively by Schindler from time to time), and then serviced by capsules (bathrooms and kitchens). The confident way with structure and the two categories of enclosure, marks this as one of Fehn’s most urbane projects.

By the time that he groups together the complex of small buildings that form the school for the deaf, he is able to call upon a whole family of pavilion types. Of course, in a nine-year gestation period (between 1968 and 1975) there may well have been successive favourites: and the observer will automatically have his own prejudices (I for one, cannot see ‘wavy’ roofs like those on the dormitory blocks, without recalling the Festival of Britain), and the similar ‘rhythmic’ occurrence of the individual education bays that poke out from the classroom block have a jauntiness that is resolved in the observation department and pre­school department buildings. Once again, these are beautifully poised in plan: there is a confidence with which Fehn uses geometries and little capsule-like elements that would suggest a more wilful personality-or a smart Japanese operator. Or is there a wilful man hidden within the calm exterior of his personality?

The clues come, I think, in his larger projects. When he is able to play a total game of escape and transfiguration of ground planes and paths, his enclosures and his lines of connection literally take off: All buildings consist of movements. In this case (that of the National Museum of Fine Arts, project of 1972), the repose of three historical buildings are the inspiration. The transformation of their rhythm into the new museum. The city floor is not touched. The pedestrian finds the old and the new museum by recognition of the old entrances. The new structure fertilises the old. The gentle slope of the bridges activates the pedestrian’s view.

‘The sensitivity of space is not just achieved by sharp impacts of form or by immediately identifiable figuration: but more by hints and tracks and mere wisps of line’

Here the ground preserves no memories. but a city floor full of life and activities, as the new structure does not interfere with movements and space.’ This notion of three-dimensionalising the floor of a city was explored by the Smithsons in their Haupstadt Berlin project and by the undulations that one finds within Shadrach Woods’ Free University of Berlin: yet in both these cases the effect is achieved more jerkily than it is suggested by Fehn.

By the time of the Trondheim library project (1978) he is audaciously opening up the city floor .... ‘A recognition of an architecture already built, like opening a shell, and the pearl is your fortune. The ground confirms a silence, together with the book il gives you the library. When a book is written, its act is already an homage to the past.’

The ultimate confirmation of Fehn’s method is to be found in his most distinguished built building (and one which has become a myth among young architects in all the Scandinavian countries). The Hamar museum is based upon an old barn which was itself constructed over the ruins of a bishop’s castle. ‘When the ground becomes history: man’s position leaves the horizon as the bridge brings him in a state of looking down at the ornamental walls from the middle ages. All answers are given by his position in relation to the earth and the sky. The man draws his shadow on the ground, but it is the construction that supports his existence in the air.’ (Fehn: Signs and Insights Urbino 1979.)

Trondheim library project (1978)

The reference to the enclosed building is by way of a boomerang-shaped ramp that echoes the shape of an ancient enclosure. The armature of this ramp rises and engages with the internal ramp system. Other insertions to the building are by way of an eccentric series of openings: some dramatically large and some very incidental indeed. Fragments of the relics exist both within and without the building shell. Architectural devices range from rounded ‘capsule’ lavatory elements and spiral staircases through to lean-tos.

Such a listing-out of the components gives little clue to either the atmosphere or the cleverness of the system. For Fehn has honed this building: using a team of craftsmen, notably metalworkers, who can plant sheets of plate glass over ragged openings in the wall, who can similarly fashion a ‘showcase’ condition where in a lesser building there would be a lay light, and the whole range of the elements – from the ramp downwards – is totally under control. The building is a poised machine in its purest form hanging above the archaeology. Such is our current preoccupation with slick iconography and the hard-hitting rhetoric of partisan symbols of the ‘technologic’, ‘mainstream’ or ‘vernacular’, that we are unused to a building that collages together devices, as in the tradition of the clockmaker, so that they seem naturally interdependent. Yet the building is heroic. Fehn, despite (again) a long gestation period for the building – it is from 1969 to 1979 this time – never surrenders his mandate as choreographer and the whole has a fascinating violence in its configuration: a violence (and, I suppose an arrogance) that comes right through to his plate-glass detailing.

Hedmark Museum, Hamar

Compared with the other architects in this series of essays, Sverre Fehn has developed more gradually, but the level to which he has brought sensitivity and poise is unusual. His most recent work includes a project for a museum at Røros. Though only existing in drawings, it seems to summarise the two territories of his work together in one. It is large enough to make an urban statement and the building is a bridge across a river, but the bridge is itself a boat – both by its shape and by its independence as a total ‘vessel’ it very deliberately chooses not to bed itself down on either bank of the river. The classic problem of relating an entrance pavilion is articulated by his (by now recognisable) trick of throwing out a jaunty ramp. The use of diagonals is assured. The building is altogether so plausible yet it has not been commissioned.

At this moment, I am intrigued that Fehn has become a crony of John Hejduk, always the most independent-minded and most honest of the New York connection. From students, I have heard how well he was rated at Cooper Union and the contrast between gentle and contemplative Oslo and the high art atmosphere of downtown New York is intriguing. I have a hunch that when we have all become a little more bored by the tricksy world to which I alluded at the beginning of this piece, we shall look much more carefully at the architectural development of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s on the northern fringe of Europe. In Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, perhaps, as well as in Norway there has been a continuous re-investigation of the idea of the building as an organism, as a device, or of the town as the potential repository for new collage-able elements. Some are traceable: but in the case of Fehn’s ramps and folds, they extend the range of architectural devices without feeling to be gimmicky.

Moreover, I have little fear that Sverre Fehn will be thrown off course by his exposure to the international mafia. A final quote (regarding the Hamar Museum): ‘If man runs after the past, he will never reach it again. Only through the manifestation of the present can the past speak ... though physically on top of everything, thoughts drift below to the ruins.’