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OCCAS
The Oslo Centre for
Critical Architectural Studies
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Books

  • Edited Journals
  • Publications

Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives

Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen
Pax/Lars Müller, 2021

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 […]

Treasures from the AHO Library

Ahmad Al-Shamma, Tora Lie Brunborg, Ingrid dale, Hanne Pedersen Falstad, Hilde Hagen, Pernille Hartvigsen, Mari Hvattum, Ida Messel, Silje Svarstad, Anna Olette Tangen, Victor Plahte Tschudi and Noah Silver

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, […]

Images of Egypt

Mari Lending, Eirik Arff Gulseth Bøhn and Tim Anstey(eds)
Pax Forlag, 2018

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 […]

A Feeling of History

Peter Zumthor and Mari Lending
Scheidegger & Spiess, 2018
https://www.scheidegger-spiess.ch/index.php?pd=ss&lang=en&page=books&book=909

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 […]

Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction

Mari Lending
Princeton University Press

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: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale

Léa-Catherine Szacka
Marsilio Editori

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 […]

Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe

Victor Plahte Tschudi
Cambridge University Press

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 […]

What is Architecture

Mari Hvattum

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 […]

Architecture, Travellers and Writers: Constructing Histories of Perception, 1640-1950

Anne Hultzsch
Legenda
http://www.legendabooks.com/titles/isbn/9781907975639.html

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. Kosmopolittenes arkitekt

Mari Hvattum
Pax

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

Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum
Torpedo Press

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

Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending, Wallis Miller and Jérémie McGowan (editors)
Lars Müller Publishers

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 […]

Architecture Depositories: Piranesi Prints and Stave Church Portals

Victor Plahte Tschudi and Mari Lending (eds.)

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

Victor Plahte Tschudi and Turid Karslen Seim (eds.)

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 […]

New OCCAS Anthology

Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum (eds.)
Pax Publishing House

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

Thordis Arrhenius
Artifice Books

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 […]

From Bayreuth to Bauhaus: The Total Work of Art and Modern Art Forms

Anders V. Munch

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 […]

Oslo Exhibition 1956

Mathilde Simonsen Dahl

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

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 […]

Copies & Originals

Karin Gundersen and Mari Lending (eds.)
Scandinavian Academic Press
http://www.spartacus.no/sap/index.php?ID=Bok&counter=605

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 […]

Punishment, Madness and Bildung: Three 19th Century Institutions

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 […]

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