Sculpting Spatial Theatricality: Snøhetta’s Petter Dass Museum and Steven Holl’s Knut Hamsun Centre

Abstract

This essay examines two Norwegian cultural icons: the Lutheran priest and poet, Petter Dass (1647–1707) and the writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920, Knut Hamsun (1859–1952). I have composed two double portraits of the men by connecting the Norwegian architectural team, Snøhetta with American architect, Steven Holl. In doing so, the essay illustrates how the Petter Dass Museum by Snøhetta and the Knut Hamsun Centre by Holl have both emerged as products of the Norwegian cultural principle of strong regionalism, particularly in terms of theatricality and environmentalism. A visitor to either the Petter Dass Museum or the Knut Hamsun Centre becomes part of a theatrical event in which four actors, two dead and two alive, the writers and the architects, communicate in physical terms about the metaphysical environment and the relationship between the scenographic and the tectonic, which literally and figuratively mixes their respective poetics into a Gesamtkunstwerk.

Keywords:

• Knut Hamsun
• Steven Holl
• Petter Dass
• Snøhetta
• Nordic regionalism

Notes

1. The work by Snøhetta and Steven Holl plays an important addition to 18 National. Tourist Routes are being developed to showcase art and architecture against backdrops of stunning natural beauty.

2. The museum was widely praised before the County Council accepted Holl’s proposal including addition of a low and horizontal auditorium because of the acquisition of his model by MoMA in 1996 and award for it by the Progressive Architecture in 1997.

3. Ain Azevedo and Manuel Joao Ramos, “Drawing Close – On Visual Engagements in Fieldwork, Drawing Workshops and the Anthropological Imagination,” Visual Ethnography 5, no. 1 (2016): 135–160.

4. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Frankfurt, Germany: Frankfurt School, 1935).

5. The region, also known as Saltan, is perhaps better recognized for having the country’s largest marble quarry.

6. Robert Ferguson, Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (New York, NY: Faber and Faber, 2011), 9. Knut Hamsun’s Childhood Home is a ten-minute drive from the Hamsun. Regarding his childhood, which Hamsun often refers to in his works and his memoirs, Hamsun remarked “My home was poor, but infinitely precious”.

7. Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil [1917], trans. Sverre Lyngstad (New York, NY: Penguin Group, 2007).

8. Marc Treib, The Landscapes of Georges Descombes, (Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2018), 15.

9. Erik Fenstad Langdalen, “A Magical Tower: From Concept to Building,” in Hamsun, Holl, Hamaroy: Literature, Architecture, Landscape, ed. Aaslaug Vaa, Nina Frang Hoyum, and Erik Fenstad Langdalen (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publisher, 2010), 137–160.

10. Goldsworthy quoted in Alastair Sooke, “He’s got the Whole World in His Hands,” The Telegraph, March 24, 2007, Arts Section.

11. Aaron Betsky. Landscrapers: Building with the Land (New York, NY: Thames & Hudson, 2002).

12. Unfortunately, the museum is closed during the winter months.

13. Petter Dass, The Trumpet of Nordland [1739], trans. Theodore Jorgensen (Northfield, MN: St. Olaf College Press, 1954). The monitors on the Petter Dass Museum exhibition walls are continually interrupted by short films about the four seasons, artistic interpretations of quotes from The Trumpet of Nordland.

14. Reidar Dittman, “The Trumpet of Nordland by Petter Dass and Other Masterpieces of Norwegian Poetry from the Period 1250–1700,” Scandinavian Studies 27, no. 1 (1955): 32–35.

15. Robert Bly, Hunger, (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1967), 15. “Building as a Body: Battleground of Invisible Forces” is a direct quote from the Robert Bly’s 1967 translation of Hunger.

16. Peter MacKeith, “Battleground of Invisible Forces,” review of the Hamsun Centre at Hamarøy, by Steven Holl, Architecture Norway Online Review, March 05, 2010.

17. Langdalen, “A Magical Tower,” 2010.

18. Ferguson, Enigma, 2011.

19. Ingar Sletten Kolloen, Knut Hamsun: Dreamer & Dissenter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 93.

20. Walter Gibbs, “Norwegian Nobel Laureate, Once Shunned, Is Now Celebrated,” The New York Times, February 27, 2009. The Norwegian sculptor Skule Waksvik portrayed both Petter Dass and Knut Hamsun in bronze, and these statues reside in their respective museums.

21. Andreas Luescher, “A Unit of Luminous Flux: Mario Botta's Centre Dürrenmatt Neuchâtel,” Journal of Architecture 12, no. 3 (2007): 239–255.

22. Knut Hamsun, Hunger [1890], trans. Robert Bly (London, UK: Duckworth, 1974), vii–viii.

23. The contents of the Hamsun Exhibition consist of nine themes: Childhood, Nordland, The Critic of Civilization, Politics, Flowers and Blood (love theme), The Modernist, Growth of the Soil, The Wanderer, Celebrated and Condemned (posthumous).

24. Daniel Rosbotton, “Knut Hamsun Centre by Steven Holl Architects, Presteid, Hamarøy Island Norway,” The Architectural Review, September 1, 2009.

25. Mari Lending, “Museum on Display,” in Hamsun, Holl, Hamaroy: Literature, Architecture, Landscape, ed. Aaslaug Vaa, Nina Frang Hoyum, and Erik Fenstad Langdalen (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publisher, 2010), 161–176.

26. Jonathan Glancey, “Norwegian Wood,” The Guardian, August 8, 2009, Culture section.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Luescher

Andreas Luescher is a Swiss architect, who is currently Professor and Chair of Architecture and Environmental Design at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. His research is on design processes in architecture, design and urban design from an aesthetic, social, public policy, sustainability as well as visual culture perspective. He has written more than 80 papers for presentation at national and international conferences as well as for publication in leading international academic journals. His most recent work can be found in the Journal of Visual Communication (with coauthor Antonio Scontrino) titled “The Anatomy of Model Trees: A Visual Exploration” (vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 1–10). He has published four books; the latest book (with coauthor Sujata Shetty), Urban Shrinkage, Industrial Renewal and Automotive Plants published by Palgrave Macmillan. In addition, he has authored three book chapters, and the latest chapter “Approaches to Sustainability in a Shrinking City: A Collaborative Urban Design Studio in Toledo’s Civic Centre Mall” (with coauthor Sujata Shetty) published by Bentham Science. He also co-edited (with Sujata Shetty) a special issue for “Urban Design International” entitled “Shrinking Cities and Towns: Challenges and Responses.”