![]() Their firm has designed both the award-winning Vennesla library and the stunning Finansparken office building, to mention just a few of their commissions. It's beautiful, and it's a very sustainable and environmentally friendly solution," says Siv Helene Stangeland, partner and creative director at Helen & Hard architects. "We think that timber is the right material for the green transition in the building industry. Norwegian engineers, designers and architects are now rediscovering and inventing new ways of using this versatile, renewable and extremely flexible material, which even can withstand hurricanes and drastic changes in climate. Several devastating city fires, such as the one in Ålesund in 1904, paved the way for a policy of building more concrete buildings in urban areas.īut after the Second World War, when materials were scarce, wood helped us reconstruct our homes again, and the first ferdighus, cheap, pre-fabricated houses, began to flood the country.īut it was not until later that wood really had its renaissance. Take note when you travel by train many of the older stations are wonderful examples of this style! You can see traces of all the popular European art styles in Norwegian wood architecture: everything from renaissance, classicism, and baroque to Jugend, functionalism, and modernism.Įspecially noteworthy are the old patrician style houses, and houses built in the romantic, Norwegian 'Swiss style', of which you can find many examples throughout Norway. Today, you can cruise through impressive timber-walled lock chambers on both the 105-kilometre-long Telemark Canal and the Halden Canal on historical wooden vessels.Īs we have seen, our wood architecture also reveals much about how the present interacts with the past.Ĭhanging times have successively introduced new trends. Several huge canals were built to transport timber from more distant, forested inland valleys to coastal ports. Unfortunately, unregulated timber trading threatened to completely deforest large parts of Norway's west coast. ![]() In Southern Norway, cities like 'The Dutch Town' of Flekkefjord, Mandal, and Risør, 'the wooden house town', to name a few, grew forth as shipping harbours for the timber and fisheries trades. You can still visit many of the idyllic, white wooden testaments to the timber trade period. Did you know that big parts of Amsterdam actually rest on piles made from Norwegian trees? In the17th and18th centuries, the Netherlands was the world's wealthiest country and a leader in shipbuilding, generating great demand for strong wood. ![]() Stronger boats were built of wood to be able to fish further from shore, and to transport Norway's new 'gold' - Timber - all the way to Europe to the Netherlands, Denmark and, later, the UK in particular. After the glorious (but also quite bloody) Viking Era, Norway entered a darker and less prosperous chapter in the Middle Ages. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |