NORDIC PAVILION 1962 (SVERRE FEHN)
Sverre Fehn’s pavilion is an example of such an art of measurement. Fehn himself often used the expression “poetic.” By “poetic” in this broad sense, Fehn, I assume, was hinting at what he once formulated thus: “The architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in the language of construction” 6 Or, as he said about his pavilion, that he was searching for simplicity and expressivity: “To say much with a few artistic effects—as in a poem.” 7 The Norwegian “dikte,” as the German “dichten” (to write poetry)—for which there is no equivalent in English—etymologically derives from a word meaning inventing or creating, bringing forth, embodying in a piece of work. With his 1962 pavilion, Fehn has created a work that is both simple and complex.
Fehn’s architecture is often described as “poetic modernism.” That the pavilion is modernistic means, above all, that it is autonomous. But it does not stand there in splendid isolation. It unites with the adjacent Danish and American Pavilions. A simple device allows the pavilion shell to interact with the Danish and the American neo-classical neighbours. Thus Fehn’s pavilion also manifests the art of the location, conversing with the trees and interrelating with nearby structures.
Fehn believed of architecture that it “works in a timeless space.” The utterance stems from a journey he made in Morocco in 1952. 9 The mural architecture of the region reminded Fehn of Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. It was not a question of repeating the past or breaking away from it. “Only by manifesting the Now can we get the Past to speak.” 10 This modernistic insight implies that architecture is committed to its own time. Why? Because it is only by accepting responsibility, being on terms with the present, that aspects of the past can be actualized, allowing us to become alive to what went before. This does not mean that what is being created should be timely. On the contrary, it can be untimely in the Nietzschean sense, by opposing whatever is dominant in the present, and instead doing whatever the Now demands must be done. In this way Fehn spoke of architecture as returning “the earth back to itself.” 11 This sounds Heideggerian: The work of architecture (and art in general) is to let the earth be earth, not to violate it, but to allow the earth’s materials to stand forth, to glitter, to be heavy, to be earthen. For Fehn the world of architecture is our lifeworld, in the phenomenological sense. A world where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Fehn continuously talked and wrote about his projects and about architecture in general. He kept diary notes, sketch books, wrote dialogues, including his “Dialogues With Palladio,” gave speeches, commented on his own works, and made his views known to colleagues. His thoughts connected with his sketches and drawings and with the progress of his projects allow us to see something more or something different, other than what we first thought of. Conversely, by seeing, we can also find new things that the words did not reveal. Because what we see, sense, feel, hear, and what we say do not overlap each other completely. Thus something new and different can appear. This is the more that architecture-as-art supplies, which represents more than can be said by words alone. It is an “increase in being,” to use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s term. It cannot simply be reduced to knowing by what and by whom Fehn was influenced, or to what kind of -ism, movement, style, or era his early works belongs to. As art, Fehn’s work is more than a historical object.
It has been said of Fehn that he often gave his projects a name, a nickname. Such a proper name cannot be grasped by identifying concepts. A nickname takes care of the nonidentical of the object.
Fehn’s pavilion demands a lot of the exhibition’s curator. But when the exhibition succeeds, by which I mean that the exhibits attract admiration and attention, then Fehn’s space is pure perfection. For it is a large, open space, uncluttered by clichés, an undecorated stage, a huge dance floor on which exhibits may perform their dance. It is not so much a room for communication, but of critique and allegory. In the same sense as the gardens themselves, I Giardini, the room is not a topos, neither a utopia, but a heterotopia: another place for other things. Fehn’s heterotopia is a part of our common ground.
Text: Common Pavilions
