Sverre Fehn

Sverre Fehn (born Aug. 14, 1924, Kongsberg, Nor.—died Feb. 23, 2009, Oslo) was a Norwegian architect known for his designs of private houses and museums that integrated modernism with traditional vernacular architecture. He considered the process of building “an attack by our culture on nature” and stated that it was his goal “to make a building that will make people more aware of the beauty of the setting, and when looking at the building in the setting, a hope for a new consciousness to see the beauty there as well.” He won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1997.

Fehn, who graduated from the Oslo School of Architecture (now the Oslo School of Architecture and Design) in 1948, was one of the renowned international group of post-World War II architects and designers that included architectural historian and theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz. Fehn was much influenced by Arne Korsmo, who introduced him to another mentor, French engineer Jean Prouvé. One of Fehn’s first ongoing projects was the Handicraft Museum in Lillehammer, Nor. (1949–56). He first gained international acclaim in 1958 at the World Exhibition in Brussels, where his Norwegian Pavilion captured first prize in the design competition. Built in the International style, the low wooden building embodied horizontality with its wide, overhanging, segmented eaves. Fehn again received widespread notice with his Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1962; it won the Biennale’s Golden Lion Award for national pavilions.

Fehn’s corpus of completed works reflects the influence of such modernists as Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Louis I. Kahn, and Frank Lloyd Wright but also particularizes the Scandinavian setting. Fehn’s Norwegian Glacier Museum (completed 1991) in Fjærland, Nor.—a long, low-lying, white-and-gray concrete structure with sloping ends—echoed the steep glaciers that surrounded it. His Hedmark Cathedral Museum (1979) in Hamar, Nor., was built astride the historic ruins of a 14th-century cathedral and manor house. Some of Fehn’s other notable museum designs include the Aukrust Center (completed 1996) in Alvdal, Nor., and the Norwegian Museum of Photography (completed 2001) in Horten, Nor. He also designed an exhibition pavilion and adapted a 19th-century Neoclassical bank building in Oslo for the Norwegian Museum of Architecture (completed 2007).

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With Per Olaf Fjeld, Fehn wrote Sverre Fehn: The Thought of Construction (1983). From 1971 to 1995 he was a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture, and he lectured widely in Europe and in the United States.