SVERRE FEHNS LEGACY Sverre Fehn left his mark within Venice. He designed and built the Nordic Pavilion to portray Scandinavia among the Venetian vernacular yet more extradinarily he also managed to capture and conduct a Nordic light within his building. The visitor now can experience a sense of place once only associated with the cold harsh countries of the north. Fehns work in Venice was a big influence on modernist thinking at the time yet his involvement in the Biennale and with other architects at the time also influenced his own career greatly. Fehn met with Carlo Scarpa during his time in Italy and was inspired by Scarpas work contrasting the old and the new. However it just over two decades later, in 1979 that Fehn completed his masterpiece. It was the Hedemark museum in Hamar that finally gelled all of Fehns ideas and philosophies together in an interplay of material and form. To realise the museum Fehn inserted his modernist traits into the ruins of a medieval bishops quarters, so that concrete platforms float above as layers of history are revealed in the ruins below. Fehn uses Scarpas Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona as a guide and employs the same minimal selection of materials as Scarpa to unveil the buildings construction. This is the par excellence
expression of his idiom that only by building the new can we achieve a dialogue with the past (Norberg Schultz 1996). Fehn simultaneously retains a Norwegian sense of form through the robust and articulate construction that centres on an interaction between wood and concrete. However Sverre Fehns “Poetic Modernism� failed for any years to be accepted by the society within which he was raised. Indeed many of his competition winning entries were never built, due to their apparent novelty. This disjointed attitude towards modernism in Norway leaving it reduced to scattering of dismembered motifs. The Norwegian people had a reluctance to enjoy the foreign influences of modernism and a lot of Fehns early commercial success was achieved in the most part overseas, most significantly with the Norwegian and Nordic Pavilions. It is only in recent years that his pieces now being seen as environmental art on the landscape, singular elements situated predominantly in the rural yet very much retaining Norwegian elements in their approaches. The Norwegian people have felt the need to reject these ideas since the 1930s yet through Sverre Fehn they can see a new concourse developing. A basis for new beginnings, a new architecture centred around the profound understanding of human existence on earth.
38. Hamar Museum, Sverre Fehn (1979)
http://elizabethquigley.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/hamar-bispegaard-museumsverre-fehn/
39. Museo di Castelvecchio, Scarpa (1965) http://www.superuse.org/story/castelveccio-museum/