SVERRE FEHN -- THE THOUGHT OF CONSTRUCTION
Per Olaf Fjeld
Per Olaf Fjeld: SVERRE FEHN -- THE THOUGHT OF CONSTRUCTION. NYC: Rizzoli, 1983. First English-language edition. A near-fine softcover book in stiff printed wrappers: an exceptional copy of this scarce monograph on the 1997 Pritzker prize-winning architect. Interior unmarked and very clean. .
10 x 10 softcover book with 192 pages and hundreds of b/w photographs, diagrams and plans. Includes material on the following projects (both realized and realized by Fehn): Church in Honningsvag; Boler community center; The Johnsrud House; Eternitt House; The Wiggen House; Norrkoping Villa; the C. Bodtker house; The Schreiner House; Skadalen School for the Deaf; the Okern Home for the Elderly; the Arne Bodtker house; 1958 Norwegian Pavilion, World Exhibitionin Brussels, Belgium; the Nordic Pavilion, Biennale.Venice, Italy; the World Exhibition, Osaka, Japan; Hamar Museum and more.
Sverre Fehn has long been recognized in Europe as Norway's most gifted architect. Categorized as a modernist by most architectural writers, Fehn himself says, "I have never thought of myself as modern, but I did absorb the anti-monumental and the pictorial world of LeCorbusier, as well as the functionalism of the small villages of North Africa. You might say I came of age in the shadow of modernism."
He has no built works in the United States, but is not a total stranger since he has been a guest lecturer at The Cooper Union in New York City; Cranbrook Academy of Arts in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts all in 1980. He has also lectured at Harvard, Cornell, and Yale. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968, and at the Architecture Association of Minneapolis in 1983.
He received international attention for his Norwegian Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Brussels, Belgium in 1958, and again in 1962 for his Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Otherwise, most of his works are in Norway, with some in Sweden and Denmark as well. He has won commissions for other structures in Italy, France and Saudi Arabia, but none of the latter have yet been built.
Fehn was one of the post World War II generation of architects who emerged from the Architectural School of Oslo, receiving his diploma in 1949. At that time, Finnish architect Alvar Aalto was a strong influence on European architecture, and in particular, Arne Korsmo, one of Norway's leading architects who became a great friend and mentor to Sverre Fehn. Fehn now lives in a house designed by Korsmo.
Korsmo, who built Norway's pavilion at the 1937 exposition in Paris, traveled extensively and knew most of the worlds leading architects of the time. He introduced Fehn to many of them, including Jean Prouvé. Fehn worked for Prouvé part of the time, and it was through Prouvé that he met Le Corbusier. It was while working for Prouvé, that Fehn discovered the artistic use of materials and construction so characteristic of the French tradition from the Eiffel Tower to Gothic cathedrals.
Fehn, along with Norberg-Schulz, Grung, Mjelva and Vesterlid, all other Norwegian architects of the same generation, and Jorn Utzon (the Danish architect who later gained fame for the Sydney Opera House, Australia) formed an organization which was the Norwegian branch of CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture), called PAGON (Progressive Architects Group Oslo Norway) that had a profound influence, creating architecture which had a firm foundation in the Modern Movement, but was expressed in terms of the materials and language of their own region and time.
In 1971, he became a professor of architecture at his alma mater in Oslo, where he taught until 1993. In addition to the lectures in the United States, Fehn has spoken at the Architectural Congress Imrata in Finland in 1954; Vasa University, Finland, 1964; Denmark's Architectural School of Aarhus in 1967 and 1970; the Stockholm Architectural Association in 1967; the University of Trondheim in 1970 and 1979; the International Laboratory of Architecture & Design in Urbino, Italy in 1979; at the Geoarchitectural Institute, Brest, France in 1979; and at the Architectural Association in London in 1981 and 1982. He has also lectured in Paris, Stuttgardt, Germany; Barcelona, Spain; and Rome.
Sverre Fehn was named the 1997 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. In making the announcement, Jay A. Pritzker, president of The Hyatt Foundation, which established the award in 1979, quoted from the jury's citation which describes Fehn's architecture as "...a fascinating and exciting combination of modern forms tempered by the Scandinavian tradition..." Fehn is the twentieth architect in the world to be selected for his profession's highest honor which bestows a $100,000 grant when the formal presentation is made on May 31 in Bilbao, Spain.
Pritzker Prize jury chairman, J. Carter Brown, commented that Fehn's work "...embodies the Pritzker Prize ideal of architecture as art." And from fellow juror, author Ada Louise Huxtable, "Sverre Fehn represents the best of twentieth-century modernism...this is a unique life's work of extraordinary richness, perception and quality." From juror Charles Correa, a much honored architect from Bombay, India, comes the praise, "...a wonderfully lyrical and inventive architectonic language which, like all true art, is both rigorous and deeply humane." Juror Toshio Nakamura, editor and architectural writer from Japan called Fehn's work "...remarkably specific in his approach to design in terms of its regional inflection, material, imagination, and implied geometry..."
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