This anthology gathers together for the first time the most influential architectural texts from the Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Many of the texts appear for the first time in English, making them available to a worldwide readership. These texts were written between 1920 and 2007 by architects who lived and worked in the Nordic countries. The book is structured in sections by country with supportive introductions by regional experts. The reader can seek out common themes of space, place, materials, etc across nations or approach the material chronologically.
Organic Design in Twentieth-Century Nordic Architecture presents a communicable and useful definition of organic architecture that reaches beyond constraints. The book focuses on the works and writings of architects in Nordic countries, such as Sigurd Lewerentz, Jørn Utzon, Sverre Fehn and the Aaltos (Aino, Elissa and Alvar), among others. It is structured around the ideas of organic design principles that influenced them and allowed their work to evolve from one building to another. Erik Champion argues organic architecture can be viewed as a concerted attempt to thematically unify the built environment through the allegorical expression of ongoing interaction between designer, architectural brief and building-as-process. With over 140 black and white images, this book is an intriguing read for architecture students and professionals alike.
Although the disciplines of architecture and structural engineering have both experienced their own historical development, their interaction has resulted in many fascinating and delightful structures. To take this interaction to a higher level, there is a need to stimulate the inventive and creative design of architectural structures and to persua
Translated by Thomas McQuillan 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 which attempts to define, for the first time, what Nordic building really is. Norberg-Schulz begins by contrasting the natural world of the North with that of the Mediterranean, the Nordic unendingness against the sun-saturated and homogeneous South. Using themes such as "natural," "domestic," "universal," and "foreign," he finds the architecture of both regions sensibly related to their environments; but whereas the South lends itself to abstraction, the North is marked by variation, openness, and dynamism—by low light, forests, and space. Exploring the ways built experience "takes place," Norberg-Schulz charts the distinctive character of land and climate that distinguishes Denmark's, Sweden's, Finland's, and Norway's architectural traditions 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.
This book explores how the concept of ‘region’ has evolved over time and shaped architectural culture and practice. It questions what the words ‘region’ and ‘regional’ mean for architecture, cities and landscapes past and present, and speculates on the forms they might take in the future. Region is explored in many thematic guises: as a real geographical site of evolving socio-economic activity; as a mythical locus of enduring value; as a gatekeeper of indigenous crafts and vernacular techniques; as a site of architectural and artistic imagination; as a repository of contested, conflicted and mobile identities. The contributing chapters take these themes from the theoretical and literary page through to architectural and urban practice, and from the scale of the domestic hearth through to the ocean archipelago and international law, enriching the long-standing trope of viewing architectural regionalism purely as a matter of style. Curated into four key thematic areas – Theorised Regions, Contested Regions, Heritage Regions and Future Regions – the book incorporates the values, concerns and approaches of a truly diverse international community of scholars, curators and practitioners, as well as the design work of international students tasked to explore what region means to them.
From 1960–1980, both eastern and western Europe experienced a construction boom of new dimensions. Cybernetics, the science of planning, and sociology, as well as the new possibilities offered by technology and production, paved the way to large-scale processes and systems in architecture and urban design, which favored technocratic and utopian concepts. Increasingly, architects and planners saw themselves as designers of comprehensive infrastructure and mega-structures in a technology-focused world. The authors assesses these developments on the back of a knowledge transfer between East and West. It confirms a change in attitude that can still be felt today – recession, social changes, and environmental problems led to criticism of the then contemporary concepts of modernity.
Although Swedish design has exercised an extraordinary influence on modern architecture and interior furnishings internationally since the early twentieth century, the intellectual background from which it emerged is far less wellknown, for some of the crucial, generative writings on the subject by Swedish thinkers of the time have never been widely translated. Modern Swedish Design Theory collects three of these seminal essays for the first time in English. Accompanying these texts in the book are introductory essays and a postscript by the renowned architectural historian Kenneth Frampton.
Kay Fisker (1893-1965) is considered one of the most influential Danish architects of the twentieth century, and yet there has existed until now no in-depth English-language study of his works and writing. Published as part of the Bloomsbury Studies in Modern Architecture series, which brings to light the work of significant yet overlooked modernist architects, this book examines Fisker's key projects – from his early railway stations and innovative housing projects to the Danish Academy in Rome – and analyses his work as a historian and writer. Fisker's output is closely associated with the functional tradition, a hybridization of international modernism and regional architectural typologies, and this book shows how his architectural poetics can be understood as an amalgamation of an ideal order with the contingent conditions of landscapes and urban sites. Hybridization is not only a valuable notion for understanding Fisker, the book argues, it can also be applied to an understanding of modernist architecture as a whole, with its various expressions, agendas and tensions both regionally and internationally.
Modernism was instrumental in the development of twentieth and twenty-first century Scandinavian architecture, for it captured a progressive, urbane character that was inextricably associated with, and embraced the social programmes of the Nordic welfare states. Recognized internationally for its sensitivity and responsiveness to place and locale, and its thoughtful use of materials and refined detailing, Nordic architecture continues to evolve and explore its modernist roots. This work covers the romantic and classical architectural foundations of Nordic modernism; the development of Nordic Functionalism; the maturing and expansion of Nordic modern architecture in the post-war period; international influences on Scandinavian modernism at the end of the twentieth century and finally, the global and local currents found in contemporary Nordic architecture.
This book examines the work of three seminal Nordic architects - Alvar Aalto, Jørn Utzon and Sverre Fehn - from a phenomenological perspective, utilising the methodology of 'paradigm' (or 'in the manner of''). Roger Tyrrell explains how the approach of each architect is defined by the three sub-frames of the paradigm: that of the ‘origin’ (arche), that of ‘revealing’ (techne), and that of ‘the poetic conjunction’, in order to gain a holistic understanding of the experiential or phenomenological predisposition of the three architects. Using this method the author describes the commonalties and distinctive qualities of the architecture and design methods of Aalto, Utzon and Fehn. The final chapter projects the intellectual heritage of the three protagonists into the contemporary world, examining the work of practices from the UK, Norway and the USA that each extend this particular way of making place.
