Lines of Sight, Lines of Site: Sverre Fehn, Arne Næss, and Joined Methods in Environmental Representations

Architectural histories of Norway have been inexorably tied to landscapes and localisms, framed as the romantic wedlock of nature, horizon, and the built form. Perhaps the country’s most renowned architect, the late Sverre Fehn (1924-2009) is being taken to be the paradigmatic figure of a generation of Nordic architects who understood the outdoors scenery, at times overwhelming in its drama, as primarily expressed within and through buildings. Throughout the last century, this attitude was the accepted orthodoxy – solidity, shelter, rootedness, worlds of sublime light, and wood and stone; these design inclinations suggest a natural aesthetic that strengthen canon tropes and narratives of the architectural North.

Yet I argue that Fehn’s early drawing works – sketches and studies of buildings on site; mappings, sights, landscape paintings of sorts – reveal a perspective on nature that subtly differs from the said tropes and narratives. In these drawings, architecture does not really frame nor does it mimic its mystical surroundings. Rather, it is depicted in ways which suggest something like an “ontological equivalence,” one which allows for a beneficial difference between human and nonhuman systems. Here I place Fehn in a conceptual conversation with environmental philosopher Arne Næss; the two Norwegians were contemporaries, but apparently never met, and had no dialogue. I examine and requalify a selection of Fehn’s landscape sketches in light of Næssian normative insights. Thus understood, these drawn representations of buildings and territories mark a possibly fruitful relational change in the (architectural) world.