An ability “to give voice to the unsayable” was how the Swedish Academy explained their decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 to the prolific Norwegian author Jon Fosse. The year also marks the 40-year anniversary of Fosse’s debut with the novel Raudt, svart. The occasion prompted OCCAS-member Victor Plahte Tschudi to […]
We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, the book considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive […]
This is a book about the recording, reception and legacy of Total, an album released in October 1994 by the Norwegian rock group Seigmen. The album was produced by Sylvia Massy, an international recording legend, in Studio Nova, one of Norway’s premier sound studios. It became an instant classic that garnered raving reviews and unexpected […]
Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture, a focus that was at once intellectual, visceral, historical, and contemporary. As well as exploring how architecture had shaped systems of cultural orientation in the past, Warburg and his followers were involved a continual process of architectural commissioning in the present. Between 1923 and […]
The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari […]
This book deals with the legacy of Norway’s garden cities. It tracks the origins of the Norwegian garden city movement and discusses the current status of built examples. Through a detailed study of one example, Sinsen Garden City in Oslo, this book links the garden city heritage to a number of ongoing scholarly debates on […]
Piranesi and the Modern presents six essays and an interview that shed light on the continued relevance of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Piranesi was a researcher and an artist at the same time, “in that sense I feel pretty close to Piranesi myself,” architect Rem Koolhaas explains in an […]
In the nineteenth century, the Italian etcher, architect and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78) was if not entirely forgotten, at least vastly underrated. The gradual reintroduction of Piranesi to modern culture was significant to the extent that this book´s effort to chart it offers nothing less than an alternative history of the last century. In […]
Focusing on the year 1882, this short book explores a crucial moment in transformation of Rome from a drowsy picturesque town to a modern capital as seen through the paintings of Eilif Peterssen and Christian Skredsvig made in 1882-83. Paintings such as Peterssens Piazza Montanara and Skredsvig’s Monte Aventino emerge as delicate negotiations between inherited […]
Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece in postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition in 1958 and the building was inaugurated in 1962. Through six decades the beloved structure has been mired in phenomenology, poetry, and the personal memory of the select. Looking at the archives, a very different story […]
Editors: Mari Hvattum, Paul-Antoine Lucas, Victor Plahte Tschudi The AHO library is full of treasures. It contains beautiful folio works, rare old treatises, and valuable prints. But most of all, the library collection reflects the life of the school, its changing preoccupations, conflicts, and fascinations. Retrieving forgotten treasures from the library´s secret scores, […]
Since Napoleon invaded Egypt with an army of soldiers, scholars and engineers in 1798, images of Egyptian landscapes and monuments have circulated as fantasy and reality in the West. Soon after the Western encounter with Egypt, physical parts of the same landscape were brought to London, Paris, Turin, Berlin, and New York. Scientific exploration, artistic […]
While he was working to complete the Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian architectural historian Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. In meandering, impressionistic style, and drawing on favorite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Nabokov, T. S. Eliot, and George […]
We are taught to believe in originals. In art and architecture originals vouch for authenticity, value, and truth, calling for protection and preservation. The nineteenth century, however, looked at it differently. Full-scale plaster casts of architecture from across time and place circulated throughout Europe and America and were proudly displayed in leading museums. This book, […]
Exhibiting the Postmodern traces the origins and significance of the First International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Situating the 1980 exhibition The Presence of the Past against the larger historical backdrop in which architecture exhibitions appear, and considering their proliferation in the postmodern era, this book claims that the exhibition, beyond heralding a shift in the history […]
Why were seventeenth-century antiquarians so spectacularly wrong? Even if they knew what ancient monuments looked like, they deliberately distorted the representation of them in print. Deciphering the printed reconstructions of Giacomo Lauro and Athanasius Kircher, this pioneering study uncovers an antiquity born with print culture itself and from the need to accommodate competitive publishers, ambitious […]
Buildings, cities and landscapes affect us whether we want it or not, and can hardly be escaped. That is why architecture is so important. Written by Mari Hvattum as part of Norwegian University Press’ “what is” series, Hva er Arkitektur gives an accessible introduction to architecture as a discipline and phenomenon. Good architecture has to […]
Does the way in which buildings are looked at, and made sense of, change over the course of time? How can we find out about this? By looking at a selection of travel writings spanning four centuries, Anne Hultzsch suggests in Architecture, Travellers and Writers (Legenda, 2014) that it is language, the description of architecture, which offers answers […]
Heinrich Ernst Schirmer (1814–1887) was one of the most significant architects of 19th century Norway. He designed churches, prisons, schools, stations, hospitals and houses all over the country, including Norway’s first penitentiary, the first mental hospital, and the first public museum; The National Gallery in Oslo. The poet J.S. Welhaven described Schirmer as “our best […]
Modelling Time: The Permanent Collection 1925–2014 chronicles the exhibition Model as Ruin at the House of Artists in Oslo, November 1 – December 15, 2013. Together with master students from the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Mari Hvattum and Mari Lending brought a unique, modernist model collection out of the archives, re-exhibiting it at […]
Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture (Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich 2014) investigates historical and contemporary practices of displaying architecture, whether at full scale or as fragments, models, or two-dimensional representations. Exploring questions of circulation and temporality, issues of institution and canon, and the discourse and politics of architectural spaces on exhibit, this volume addresses the ambiguous […]
It might seem long between G. B. Piranesi’s engravings of antique ruins from the mid 18th century and Norwegian stave church portals in flux through 19th century European and American collections of plaster casts. Yet, both engravings and plaster casts were once mass media: The copper plate and the mould were part of technological regimes […]
From Site to Sight is the title of volume twenty-six in the prestigious Acta-series issued by the Norwegian Institute in Rome and the Roman press Scienze e Lettere. The contributions by acclaimed scholars investigate the transformation of place in various kinds of texts across the ages, and unravel the aesthetical, religious, political, and technological reasons […]
Vor Tids Fordringer. Norske arkitekturdebatter 1818–1919 [The Demands of our Time. Norwegian debates on architecture 1818–1919] published on Pax Forlag is a collection of 75 texts on architecture, gathered from a range of different sources. The editors Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum have scoured newspapers, parliament proceedings, poems, dissertations, diaries, and guidebooks to uncover the […]
The Fragile Monument by Thordis Arrhenius is a study of the discourse of conservation and its effect on the notion and role of the monument in contemporary Western society. Through a revisionist account of the history of conservation, the book explores how the monument has been transformed from an object that originally communicated permanence to […]
The dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total work of art uniting forms of art and redeeming culture – can be followed in many movements of modern art, design and architecture. There seems to be far from Richard Wagner’s festivals in Bayreuth to the many experiments of the avant-garde as ephemeral visions for a future […]
Mathilde Simonsen Dahl presents her OCCAS Master’s thesis on the 1956 exhibition at the Oslo Architects Association and the debate that surrounded it. Dahl’s is the first OCCAS Master’s thesis. Her extensive archival work sheds new light on the public mediation of post-war Norwegian architecture, and substantially contributes to the understanding of the architecture culture […]
Routes, Roads and Landscapes brings together outstanding scholars from cultural history, geography, philosophy, and a host of other disciplines, examining the complex entanglement between routes and landscapes in Europe and North America from 1750 until the present. It traces changing conceptions of the landscape, looking at how movement has been facilitated, imagined and represented and how […]
Architecture, philosophy, art, music and fiction: The convoluted relations of the copy to the original is studied through a wide range of aesthetic disciplines in this anthology, edited by Karin Gundersen and Mari Lending, and published by Scandinavian Academic Press, Oslo. Drawing on an OCCAS seminar in Athens spring 2010, the volume contains several chapters […]
In the autumn semester 2011, the studio ’Architecture on display’ gathered seven AHO master students for an intensive study of 19th century institutions: Norway’s first modern prison (Christiania Penitentiary, 1851), the first mental hospital (Gaustad asylum, 1855), and the first public art museum (the National Gallery, 1881). Through archival research, literature studies, academic writing, and curatorial […]
