Christian Norberg-Schulz

This comprehensive monograph presents fifty projects from throughout the four decades of Fehn's career. Featured are such important works as the Archbishopric Museum of Hamar, the Glacier Museum in Fjaerland, and the Aukrust Museum in Alvdal, all in Norway. Also included are a number of houses and several competition projects, both built and unbuilt. Each of the works in this volume is illustrated with extensive photography, presentation drawings, and Fehn's signature sketches. Complementing the architectural projects are essays by Francesco Dal Co, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Gennaro Postiglione, which present an analytic portrait of the architect's career, and an anthology of writings by Fehn and critics.

Architecture is a manifestation of the environment in which it is placed, observes distinguished architect and theoretician Christian Norberg-Schulz. A simple enough observation, but one that becomes subtle and nuanced in this landmark book that attempts to define, for the first time, what Nordic building really is. Exploring the ways built experience "takes place," Norberg-Schulz charts the distinctive character of land and climate that distinguishes the architectural traditions of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway from each other and from those to the south. While each of these countries might be said to share regional traits, Norberg-Schulz identifies differences (the cultivated and closely detailed landscape and architecture of Denmark, the dramatic, structured forms of Norway) that allow him to account for the way individual Nordic architectures evolved.

"The redesigned paperback of the original Italian edition published in 1972 by Electa Editrice, Milan, and the English translation published in 1974 by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York"--Verso t.p.Includes index. Bibliography: p. 207-208.

Norberg-Schulz is a practicing architect ;his buildings stand in several countries ;and he elucidates the nature of architectural reality with a practiced eye and from a practical viewpoint. Although the methods and theory that his book develops are uncompromisingly rigorous and tightly formed, they are everywhere related to actual building, through specific examples and through the use of over 100 photographs. The structure that Norberg-Schulz has fashioned is surely one of the most impressive intellectual edifices that any architect has ever produced. The materials that are organically worked into it include Gestalt psychology, the mechanics of perception, information theory, modern analytic philosophy, and in particular, linguistic analysis, and the general theory of signs and symbols. The result, however, is not an eclectic hodge-podge ;all these materials have their place and purpose ;none is applied extraneously for "show" or purely decorative effect. And all this divergent material had to be joined according to plan within formal bounds in order to produce a theory with equally divergent applications: one that can treat not only of the aesthetics of architecture but equally well of its social, psychological, and cultural effects. The chief focus of the book is on the symbolic and linguistic. The purpose is to develop an integrated theory of architectural description and architectural intention (and this includes the intention of the user as well as that of the designer), insofar as architecture is an art.

The scope of this exhibit is the presentation of an array of experiences, vast yet at the same time unified. The unity of place and of the formation of its protagonists permits us, we hope, to bring them together despite their diversities and to underscore the continued vitality of that artistic realm perhaps most typically American. Behind these young, but already acknowledged architects, one cannot help but feel the presence of the fascinating personalities of Sullivan, Wright and Mies: logical and deducible relationship, although at times one of lashing contrasts. The more we examine the phenomenon called "post-modern", the more we realize that, as in every attempt to attach a label to a movement of complex situations and personalities, we are confronted by a multiform reality. In this new Chicago, the relationship to the recent and not so recent past is, at any rate, clearly manifest. But it is not our intention to signify this phenomenon as some sort of model or paradigm; on the contrary, the factors and occurrences merely glimpsed at here are part of a much broader context whose characteristics and developments we can only follow with time. The fact that this exhibition has been prepared in a museum suggests the concept of the Museum as a place which, as in our case, from the illustrious name of the architect who renovated it down to the daily activities that go on there, aspires to a live contact with the present as well as with the past: inseparable aspects of cultural activity.