The intention of this book is to focus precisely on Sverre Fehn’s architecture itself and to remind readers, architects, and students to consider the unique value and relevance of his art of constructing spaces. The first encounter with the work of the great Scandinavian master and the experience of his buildings and projects, in reality, elicit the immediate fascination with an emotional and atmospheric quality of his architecture.

Each project is a beautiful, distinct entity with its logic and a clear set of rules. When seen together, they create a strong spirit of the work as a whole. As it is always the case with great architecture, behind the first observation, there are many deeply personal desires, ideas, images, and decisions. Brought together with the necessity and intention they coagulate into a form of evolving the timeless language, which makes these spaces to appear as they do.

This book presents a kind of monographic collection of some sixty built and unbuilt projects from more than fifty years of Fehn’s production of architecture. Each of them, in its way, exhibits strong own gestural constructive language, and sometimes a brutal sense of assertiveness of architecture. This language paralleled with the sensual qualities of spaces and the physical spatial composition, derived from the underlying abstract geometry of form and construction. How then to present so many vital parameters, necessary to create a specific experience of spaces into a clear book on his architecture? This book is discussing the architecture of Sverre Fehn in a particular way.

The uniform and precise redrawing of the chosen projects beautifully corresponds intending to provide a new generation of interested readers with a sense of understanding the essential qualities of his spaces. The drawings, together with the photographs, both old, black and white, archive photographs mainly by Teigen Atelier and new color images by Stefano Graziani, discuss precisely Fehn’s structures and the experience they produce. Indirectly, they trace the architectural energies behind and our possible imaginary experience of these spaces. 

The allure of imagining the physical and experiential presence of this architecture is created by going through the drawings, while simultaneously looking at photographs, pictured with the high precision. The short and precise texts, compiled from project descriptions, explain the engagement in the production and experience of their spaces. More than that, an architectural book can’t do.


All that, in the end, offers the bundle of ideas, inspirations, and information, creating the increased intensity of presented buildings. In spite of a silent language of the book, the presentations possibly reflect well the diverse perspectives of the projects, their extensive network of relationships, architectural, gestural, technical, cultural and social, the richness of Fehn’s architecture.



Authors
Neven Mikac Fuchs, Aleksandra Ognjanov, Stefano Graziani


Photography
Stefano Graziani


Format
245 x 320 mm


Page lenght
408 pages


Anticipated Print Run
2000 copies


Published by
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König