The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) is organizing this year’s Sverre Fehn Symposium on October 9, 2024, at Domkirkeodden, Hamar. The theme for this year’s symposium is «Fehn Among Others»

Sverre Fehn (1924–2009) is often depicted as a solitary figure, an auteur whose musings on architecture in the landscape witness a deep personal connection with the natural world, but often remain silent about the people that populate it. As the first Scandinavian architect to be awarded the Pritzker Prize, he is often portrayed as a quintessentially Norwegian and Nordic architect. But his conceptual world was informed by a perpetual interest in the international discourse. 

Fehn’s work is intimately connected with the architects he nurtured friendships with, and the foreign locales that fascinated him. When asked in an interview in 1995, in the last year of his 24-year tenure as a professor at AHO, what was most important aspect of the school to maintain, he replied, “International contact.”

Now, at the centennial of his birth, it is time to trace the contexts that informed his work. This year’s Fehn symposium is devoted to a surprisingly overlooked facet of his oeuvre: its collaborative dimension and the international contacts that he nurtured throughout his life. Whether through the close friendship he maintained with Jean Prouvé, at whose Paris office he worked in the early 1950’s, or his pivotal rapport with John Hejduk in New York after they met in 1977, Fehn’s international orientation was an essential aspect of the evolution of his work. The presentations are archive-based, presenting new facts and interpretations on Fehn’s work. 

The Fehn Symposium Programme 2024: 

• Welcome by Hege Maria Eriksson (AHO)
• Mari Lending (AHO): Fehn at Ateliers Jean Prouvé
• Espen Johnsen (UiO): Fehn among Peers: The Formative Years (1947–1956)
• Erik Langdalen (AHO) : Fehn and the Engineers
• Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale): Families of Forms and Families of  Minds: Fehn among Finns
• Gisle Nataas: The Sound of Fehn
• Tom Avermaete (ETH Zürich): Fehn in the World: The Politics and Practices of Nordic Architecture Abroad
• Hamish Lonergan  (University of Melbourne): Pedagogical Practicalities and Poetry: Fehn at ILA&UD
• Thomas McQuillan (AHO): A Mosaic of Realities: Fehn in New York
• Per Olaf Fjeld (AHO): The Work and Situation leading to The Thought of Construction
• Joakim Skajaa (Nasjonalmuseet): Two Prototype Houses in Clay and Hay
• Neven Fuchs (AHO): Sverre Fehn Architecture and its Others