The tradition is to target the qualitative assessment of building properties that are not measurable, such as perceptions, feelings, meanings, and symbols. The basis of this assessment is the immediate aesthetic understanding and sensation of one or several buildings, and in fact the taste of the project — what the observer likes or does not like. The meaning conveyed by architecture is unstable, because it will change to some extent over time. The architect too cannot control opinions. Individuals have different interpretations, and the completed work is often interpreted regardless of the intention behind it. Therefore, the scientific basis of this assessment is the rules of the market and the profession, examples, ideals, and typologies. An architecturally successful building is rarely the product of a fully democratic participatory process, but user participation in planning and design is a valuable complement and corrective for professionals. For the promotion of discussion and the spirit of professional competition among commissioners, decision-makers, and the general public, the formulation of criteria and methods for evaluating and criticizing architecture is of great importance and can bridge the gap between professionals and the public. The Design and Construction Document provides guidance for architectural quality using these terms: aesthetic design of the surroundings, visual qualities, architectural design, and building execution. 1 - Aesthetic design of the surroundings relates to providing good design for the surroundings and the residential environment, and preserving the characteristics of the site. 2 - Good visual quality means that the shape of the building should represent its function, and that other visual qualities, such as the interplay of volume and height, facade expression, and the like, are preserved in design and execution. 3 - Good architectural design means the integration of visual quality, usability, practicality, and the overall design of a work. 4 - Good building execution means good design of the surroundings. An annual award by this name is given by the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development to buildings and environments that have contributed to the promotion, renovation, and advancement of building work through execution, materials used, design, and the interplay of place and environment. Architects and other professional groups: In the field of architecture, several professional groups work: landscape designer, interior architect — which itself includes several types of designers — as well as specialists in commercial affairs and the construction industry and public and private sectors. The design of public buildings, roads, power plants, and the like is increasingly carried out by interdisciplinary groups that seek good and comprehensive solutions. In this regard, the architect can play a coordinating role. Public architecture: It is the government's tradition to employ prominent architects for important building projects — for example, in the construction of railway stations in the late nineteenth century, and the post-World War II reconstruction era, when architects and other specialist groups helped realize the dream of creating a prosperous and modern country by building better houses, schools, roads, and everyday services. Another specific policy for promoting the architectural quality of the environment was presented in connection with the 1975 Architectural Heritage Year and the urban environment campaign. Simultaneously, a national building committee was formed in 1981 and 1982 to increase awareness of the architectural quality of buildings. Around 2000, when the committee was dissolved, the responsibility for continuing the work was transferred to the Housing Bank, whose work was not limited to housing. Since the 1960s, public awareness regarding the design and repair of environmental effects caused by power plants has increased. The "Beautiful Roads" award held in 1988 was the result of prioritizing three architects from three periods, Ola Hagen. Pulpit Cabin, Helen and Hard Architects AS. The Lantern, Atelier Oslo. Oslo School of Architecture and Design, Jarmund/Vigsnæs AS.
good road architecture. Furthermore, the government also sparked extensive professional debates by emphasizing design. The 1994 Winter Olympics site. For the first time in 1991 and 1992, architecture, design, and aesthetics of the surrounding environment were introduced as an important part of Norway's cultural policy. Following that, Norsk Form was established in 1993, and the Museum of Architecture, which had been founded in 1975, was strengthened. Political awareness of architectural issues also increased considerably from the 1990s and is considered at all levels of management. Over the past decade, the national aspiration for a creative and distinctive architecture has borne fruits such as the new Opera House building and the National Tourist Route project. * This text is a translation of the introduction to the book Architecture Now: Norwegian Architecture Policy, compiled in 2009. Endnotes: 1 - Nikolaus Pevsner. 2 - Norsk Form. Nansen Park Fornebu, Oslo (Bjørbekk and Lindheim Landscape Architects).
Common Ground in Today's Norwegian Architecture. Harsh and cold climate, enduring frost, pristine and untouched landscapes, mountains and valleys, scattered cities and settlements — these are the first images of Norway that come to mind. Today, other indicators must be added to these images. An oil-based economy alongside social democracy and egalitarian policies have enabled Norway to acquire the highest wealth and health index in 2014, and to have a homogeneous society with a high level of public trust between different layers of society and between the people and the government. Norway has always been a forerunner in providing the necessary indicators for choosing an ideal society based on quality of life. As quoted from Terry Lynn Karl in the book The Paradox of Plenty, contrary to oil countries such as Algeria, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Indonesia, whose economies and politics have suffered greatly from improper oil management, Norway has been able to properly utilize its oil economy by relying on a more advanced and diversified economy and by benefiting from strong governmental organizations for counteracting the pressures and risks associated with this prosperity. The political system of this country has also been capable of providing a high degree of welfare and trust for its citizens through reliance on civil rights and the provision of public interests. In this context, Norwegian architecture in recent decades has been able to flourish and have a presence at the international level as well. Of course, architecture is a longstanding tradition in Norway that has always strived to offer the highest quality to its users, and architects and theorists such as Sverre Fehn and Christian Norberg-Schulz have had great influence on the development of the Theory of Place and the use of vernacular and geographical potentials in architecture — theories that have attracted greater attention today due to the limitation of resources, environmental problems, and the destructive effects of global capitalism on local cultures. In this text, an attempt will be made to show, through an examination of the factors and currents influencing Norwegian architecture, how common grounds, as the main resources for architects' activities, have been able to keep contemporary Norwegian architecture vital. Norway is a small country in northern Europe — somewhat smaller than Germany but much larger than Britain. Norway is a small country in the sense that not many people live in it: 12.98 persons per square kilometer, while this figure is 255 in Britain and 7,000 in Macau or Singapore. The last severe glaciation in Scandinavia left a barren strip of rocky terrain at the edge of the North Sea, and for this reason, only four percent of Norway's area is arable land. Under such conditions, a large population cannot live there. Norway's population is small and dispersed. Many of the places where people live, even in large cities, are pristine areas with rocky landscapes. The rocky terrain has given Norwegians few possibilities for using it, and Norway's history is one of poverty, colonization, and the struggle to overcome it. Historically, until the late nineteenth century, Norway was one of the poorest European countries. But since the discovery of oil in the North Sea in 1970, the country's gross national product per capita increased twentyfold, and Norway is now one of the wealthiest countries in the world. But can this wealth be cited as one of the reasons for the flourishing of Norwegian architecture in the past few decades? It is hard to deny it. Building and the construction industry are expensive and costly, and if people do not have the financial means, neither the government nor the private sector alone will be capable of construction. However, when people decide to spend their financial resources, architecture is usually at the top of the list. The total volume of transactions in Norway's construction industry is approximately 570 billion Norwegian kroner (approximately 99 billion dollars), about 15 percent of the value created in this country. By comparison, oil contributes about 22 percent to this process. Construction is the country's largest industry as measured by the number of companies in it. Looking at the history of Norway's development, one observes that poverty has made Norwegians pragmatic and forced them to concentrate their energy and creativity on solving practical problems of life. The sparse population and scarcity of resources did not provide a foundation for producing a rich culture in large cities or good universities. Norway established its first university, the Royal Frederick, in 1811, which was renamed the University of Oslo in 1939. Norway was a supplier of raw materials — fish, timber, minerals, and metals, and later hydroelectric power — that were refined elsewhere. The aristocracy that ruled from 1300 until independence in 1814 was mostly Danish or Swedish, and Norwegian architecture in those years was influenced by the Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical styles of other countries. With the beginning of the industrialization process in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, growing profits provided the ground for constructing public buildings that represented the country's increasing national self-confidence: banks, libraries, hospitals and psychiatric asylums, prisons and railway stations, schools and barracks, universities, theaters, and parliament. The growth of the middle class, simultaneous with the acceleration of modernization in Europe, gradually drove the foreign aristocracy out of the country. Norwegian architecture in this period, as before, remained under the influence of nineteenth-century European architecture, and architects such as Hans Linstow, Christian Grosch, and Heinrich Schirmer, who designed the majority of Norway's public buildings, received their education and inspirations from other European countries. When modernism began to influence architecture and question the grand symmetry and luxurious materiality of the Beaux-Arts period, it found a clear reflection at the heart of Scandinavian popular culture. Lars Backer's restaurant in 1926, the first functionalist building in Norway, in Oslo, was built only three years after the publication of Le Corbusier's Towards an Architecture and three years before the famous 1930 Stockholm Exhibition — which supported the modern movement in Scandinavia. Architects such as Ove Bang, Gudolf Blakstad, and Arne Korsmo participated in the design and construction of small and large projects, from single-family houses to industrial complexes, which can be placed among the best works of early modern architecture in Europe. There is no doubt that functionalism, as an industrial, economic, and modern alternative to the expensive craftsmanship aesthetics of previous periods, was the desire of the pragmatic Norwegian mind. Functionalist products and architecture found their way into women's weeklies and popular publications, and people understood the practical aspects of modernism rather than its aesthetic aspects. Simple aesthetics in furniture and everyday objects promised something reasonable that most Norwegians could accept and even recognize. Masters such as Odd Brochmann were certain that the slogans underlying this new and practical aesthetics would become widespread in Norway. Norwegians felt modernism in their homes — a modernism that harmonized moral, social, and aesthetic values with the economic situation of most people. General newspapers continued to introduce this modernized truth from the 1920s to 1930s, and when reconstruction efforts after World War II accelerated, Norwegian architects and designers understood the importance of this issue more than ever. When the concept of "Scandinavian design" was introduced at the "Design in Scandinavia" exhibition in 1954 in America, it was aesthetics that dominated rather than functionalism. Interestingly, the exhibition catalog did not focus on use or economy; black-and-white images of Scandinavian nature and the presentation of unique handmade ancient artifacts alongside industrial products clearly showed the aesthetic expression was the important point. After the war, Norwegian architecture more or less followed the same path as the Western world. Modernism served industrial reconstruction and post-war financial optimization, until the severely impoverished rationalism of late modernism was no longer able to respond to the questions of the day. While the rest of Europe was immersed in postmodernist conjectures, Norwegian architects continued on their own path. Architects such as Michael Graves, Charles Moore, Leon Krier, Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, and many others continued their experimentalism in architectural history in the 1980s, but the changes of course in Norwegian architecture were very slight. The part of European postmodernism that reached Norway was the efforts led by architects such as Leon Krier and Charles Moore to rewrite the formal vocabulary and details of classical architecture. Perhaps because the only two architecture theorists during this period, Christian Norberg-Schulz and especially Thomas Thiis-Evensen, concentrated their writings on presenting architecture as a language: Norberg-Schulz through an approach rooted in his understanding of Heidegger's phenomenology in the book Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980), and Thiis-Evensen in the book Archetypes in Architecture (1987), a kind of technical architectural lexicon, explained their method. Only a few architects at that time followed them. The great Norwegian consensus was maintained throughout the twentieth century, and they largely remained in modernist functionalism. But one Norwegian star moved against this current: Sverre Fehn, the first Scandinavian architect to receive the Pritzker Prize in 1997. There is no doubt that Fehn is rooted in modernism. He is someone who saw and studied Le Corbusier, worked for Jean Prouvé, and carried out his first competition in collaboration with Geir Grung — which places him well among international modernists. But from the late 1960s and especially in his later works, he chose a personal narrative for himself, a metaphorical shift that in Norway has been called "poetic modernism" — a step toward relative or subjective reality in which story, and not function, shapes architecture. Fehn was a professor at the Oslo School of Architecture from 1971 to 1995. He built few buildings but had great influence on the generation of Norwegian architects after him. The most important aspect of Fehn's ambiguous and contradictory work is that he pushed forward a path in modernism that until then seemed an unusual mode of thinking. This breaking of convention caused architects of subsequent generations, especially from 1990 onward, to choose different paths in their professional work. Newer options emerged, and a new generation of young architects appeared with the turn of the millennium, and today the image of Norwegian architecture, both domestically and internationally, has become much more diverse. In examining a spectrum of works by contemporary Norwegian architects, two major issues can be traced as common grounds shaping their work: 1 - Nature and the mode of engagement with it. 2 - The importance of the public realm. 1 - We are talking about a country that is challenging in terms of terrain. The unique characteristic of Norwegian nature is the combination of landscapes and habitats — a developed history that is still visible in Norway's dramatic landscapes and views. The people of Norway still reside in forests, mountainous regions, and valleys, or spend their holidays there. Norwegians' understanding of the relationship with the landscape and natural resources and of dealing with infrastructure and construction quality is often unemotional and pragmatic. The oil economy in the past decade has been able to increase national capabilities in many respects, and simultaneously, oil-related construction in the North Sea has brought society's attention to the issues of sustainability and the environment. Therefore, attention to environmentally friendly materials, effective solutions for energy reduction, and adaptation to climate change is at the center of Norwegian architects' attention. In this view, every building must have the least destructive effect on its surrounding environment. Wood, as an accessible, environmentally friendly, and renewable material, is a substitute for materials that require greater energy expenditure. Traditional Norwegian buildings, such as churches and private houses, were built of wood. Today too, the use of wood as Norway's most important building material is experienced in various forms by Norwegian architects. Wood also provides the possibility of combining appropriate environmental solutions with aesthetic expression. The increasing use of wood in Norwegian architecture has helped reduce the destructive effects of the construction industry on the climate and thereby contributed to sustainable development. Among the creative uses of wood in architecture, one can point to the work of the young architects Brendeland and Kristoffersen. When they designed six-story residential blocks in entirely wooden cubes, they managed to attract everyone's attention. Another successful project in the use of wood is the Watchtower by Rintala Eggertsson. This box-like structure, resembling a lighthouse, is formed from an ascending stairway path and a main space at the top for viewing the surroundings, with two smaller spaces along the circulation path. In the interior space during the day, as light passes through the gaps in the wood, a unique experience is created for visitors. Among other successful wooden projects, one can mention the Log House by Jarmund and Vigsnæs. This house is an artistic combination of traditional wood joinery techniques with modern architectural expression. The key issue in the approach to sustainability is the scrutiny of the role and relationship of nature and naturalness with the discipline of architecture and its experimental forms within the framework of the Norwegian architectural tradition. The first architect to pay attention to environmental and ecological thinking in architecture in Norway was Knut Knutsen, who in his article titled "Approach to the Human Person" in the architecture magazine Byggekunst in 1961, proposed an ecological manifesto and a call for humble architecture in a world with limited resources. Contrary to the utopian imaginings of Norwegian colleagues and the dominant international architectural culture of the 1960s, his implications laid a foundation for discussions related to sustainability in architecture today. After him, architects such as Wenche Selmer and Eliassen and Lambert Nicolaisen expanded his legacy and emphasized the importance of context and the use of materials. Simultaneously, Christian Norberg-Schulz promoted the subjects of place, monumentality, and tradition over a decade while he was editor of Byggekunst magazine. What we call sustainability today is one aspect of architectural production and a tool for expressing local characteristics and traditions in today's intensely globalized modernity. Fehn trained a generation of architects in Norway who wanted to operate in global circuits with local roots. From the mid-1980s and parallel with the technological evolution of architecture, a new generation of architects emerged who reexamined the focal points of Norwegian architecture. Their works represented a fresh approach to nature and landscape, relying on intra-disciplinary discussions and techniques that defined new objectives for Norwegian architecture in the 1990s. Among these, one can mention the Liasanden tourist route project, a work by Jensen and Skodvin. Another interesting issue in this regard is the effort to create distinction between the building and its natural environment — although this distinction has never been in conflict with the environment but is a dependent distinction. Just as the Norwegian language and script have a distinctive and special character (Ø, Æ, and Å), their architecture has also always strived to create these distinctions. This distinctiveness can be traced in the colonized roots of this country throughout history, which had caused Norway to always be influenced by the countries that had it under their dominion. Even in the past, efforts to free themselves from this dominance and create distinction in their architecture can be seen. Traditional Norwegian wooden churches had distinctive features that made them very different in the history of European architecture. The majority of projects
built in Norway, especially projects situated in natural settings, do not want to dissolve themselves in the context; rather, they want to distinguish themselves from their surroundings — like a rock or boulder that is detached and stands out from its ground — through scale, texture, and color, while attending to the context and proper placement within it. 2 - Norwegians have a particular belief in the value of democracy. One of the consequences of institutionalized social democracy in Norway is the importance given to public spaces for the display and presentation of civil rights as one of the fundamental principles of democracy. The most important reflection of this can be seen in the architecture of the Oslo Opera House, which, adjacent to the Oslo pier, is a public space whose sloped roof extends to the water's edge and creates an urban space on its surface. Given one of Norway's cultural characteristics — walking in the mountains and forests on holidays and weekends — Snohetta placed this public trait at the foundation of its design. At any time of the day and night, one can see people on its roof, and summer concerts and programs in the outdoor area of this building gather large crowds on its roof. Alongside this public image, the high quality of materials has caused the interior space of the opera to be connected with the surrounding urban network. The theater's interior space becomes accessible to the public at night through enormous glass walls, and Watch Tower, Rintala Eggertsson. Log House, Jarmund and Vigsnæs.
in this way, the building becomes part of the urban scene. With these two features (the accessible roof and the transparent interior space), Snohetta has created a method for overlapping the iconic quality of architecture with its tangibility at human scale — a kind of poetic modernism whose roots trace back to Fehn and the Norwegian theorist Norberg-Schulz. The wild nature, poverty, being under the dominion of other countries, and the struggle to overcome it throughout history have caused "togetherness" to be one of the moral characteristics of Norwegians. This can be observed in the preference for public spaces over private ones in the architecture of houses. In the design of residential spaces, the least area is given to bedrooms and the most to public spaces, and public spaces are also generally designed in an expansive and interconnected manner so that this publicness is felt more. Norway's cultural horizons have changed due to new forms of life and their related needs, the oil economy and high economic growth accompanied by improvement in quality of life through the existing political structure. This has created unique grounds and potentials for Norwegian architects — a longstanding Norwegian tradition of giving opportunities to younger architects so that they can offer fresher interpretations of architecture and the built environment in close connection with human beings and nature. Liasanden national tourist route, Jensen and Skodvin. Trollstigen national tourist route, Reiulf Ramstad. Roadside Restroom, Manthey Kula. Oslo Opera House, Snohetta, building as a public platform.