Precedents
Hedmark
Museum, Archbishopric Museum, Hamar, Norway 1967-1979
(architect: Sverre Fehn)
If
you chase after the past, you will never catch up with it.
Only by manifesting the present can you make the past speak.
The main architectural concept has been to create a museum
which preserves the existing remains of Hamar Bispegard and
orhamar barn and makes it possible for the archaeological
excavations to function as an important part of the actual
museum, in line with the exhibits. The construction in connection
with the building of the new museum does not at any point
touch the medieval walls and ruins. A "suspended museum"
has been created, and this makes it possible to be in a position
to understand history---not with the aid of pages of a book---but
as it appears in the world of archaeology.
The museum has the following main dispositions:
1. The north-facing wing (the old cow barn) laid out as an
ethnographic museum.
2. The west-facing wing (middle wing) dedicated entirely to
the Middle Ages.
3. In the south-facing wing is the auditorium,departments
for temporary exhibitions and offices for the administration
of the museum.
The museum is not limited to the interior of the walls and
roof of the barn. With the aid of ramps, its rhythm and traffic
are directed so that constant contact with the excavations
is also maintained around the building.
The work on the museum on Domkyrkeodden (Cathedral Point)
has entailed a continual confrontation with another epoch
in time---the Middle Ages.
But
the very nature of its transitormess, the tree belongs to eternity---walls
belong to history.
The inclusion of the ruins entails an irregularity which at
once attracts attention in that it is in contradictory relation
to the "precision" of our day.
But gradually this picture changes and you acknowledge that
this art of building has a precision dictated by the rhythm
of human beings, the formation of the landscape and the movement
of the sun, wind, and rain.
The plan of Hamar Cathedral probably appeared one morning in
the dew-soaked grass to---let us call him the architect. The
drawings in the grass made by his feet provided the dimensions
of the building and formed the foundations of a working process
which could only be corrected by the resistance of the stones
and the temperament of the walls. The result of this building
process, in so many ways an impulse of the eye, manages to release
a dialogue with your heart and mind. So it becomes a judge of
the situation of the day, in which the building has locked itself
firmly into organisational forms which totally frustrate and
kill all intuitive development. The result is a meaningless
primitivism because the necessary proximity is no longer there.
The architect no longer responds to our countryside and our
concept values. That is why human beings of our day are constantly
drifting into places on the earth where human precision is yet
to be found. (A+U 1999:01)
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