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My review of the Nordic Pavilion is now on Building Design online, have a look at it here.
This year, Sweden, Norway and Finland celebrated 50 years of the Sverre Fehn-designed Nordic Pavilion, which was inaugurated in 1962 with the original concept of bringing the Nordic Light to Venice. The exhibition, playing on this theme, is titled Light Houses and shows the work of thirty-two young architects born after the year of 1962- eleven from Finland and Sweden, and ten from Norway- who have presented thirty-two small conceptual ‘houses’. Each participant’s installation responds to the spatial and atmospheric qualities of the Pavilion, while also being reflective of the architect’s own design principles. The result is simple, highly tactile and very Scandinavian.
The exhibition is all about experiencing the ‘Light Houses’, or elämys as the Finnish would call it, an enriching understanding of experience, that as curator Peter MacKeith notes, is not merely enjoyable in a directly physical way, or aesthetic in a cognitive awareness of forms and colours, but occurs to a profound depth of emotional resonance. This is what MacKeith is inviting you to do- come into this open house, walk among them, contemplate the designs, even touch a few if you would like- all a welcoming change from being brainwashed with endless information as with some of the other pavilions.
Images my own
The various works are elevated onto steel-legged pedestals, designed by Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa, a friend and colleague of Fehn. Many of these are at eye-level but some hover suspended at different heights, so you can inhabit them physically, by raising your head into them or bending down to peer through them.
Of a selected few, Tham & Videgård Arkitekter have presented a distilled version of their mirrored Tree Hotel in Harads, suspended in the midst of a deep wild forest in the north of Sweden. In Praise of Shadows Architecture have created Elma, a huge hunk of elm wood, treated on each side with variations in tactility, inviting the visitor to further alter it with their caresses. Similarly, JKMM Architects’ ‘Light House’ is a sculptural log of an ash tree, with its rotten core carved out, again the subtlety being in the different treatments of the surface. A frightened white rabbit stands on its hind legs for Haugen/Zohar Arkitekter’s entry, reminding us that in order to avoid extinction, the architectural profession needs to become more aware and adaptable. Another one to look out for, or listen out for, is Manthey Kula’s suspended grey felt speaker that plays the fictional dialogue between Sverre Fehn and Andrea Palladio. This is positioned next to an OSB board crate seat that is also used to transport the speaker, within the constraints of the 600x600x600mm cube set out by the curator of the Pavilion for all thirty-two entries.
In principle, the whole exhibition embodies the “essence” or “identity” of Nordic architecture, which was so well conceived in Fehn’s Pavilion by uniting interior and exterior. All the classic hallmarks of Nordic design are there, from simplified form, to the frugal use of materials, and a sensitivity to the natural site. This is something the Nordic countries are suggesting could be useful all over the world, with sobering economic constraints and diminishing environmental resources that currently limit architects in every nation. As Finnish historian Matti Klinge says, ‘to build ‘lightly’ is therefore to build responsibly and ethically’.
