Voices From the Archives

“It struck us as surprising that nothing has ever been published on the political and institutional background of this Nordic collaboration,” said Mari Lending this Tuesday at Princeton’s Media + Modernity Program. She was referring to the subject of her new book, authored with fellow speaker Erik Langdalen, entitled Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice: Voices from the Archives. Avoiding the tendency to be yet-another-interpreter of Fehn’s work, Lending said she and Langdalen “use[d] the archives as [their] voluntary straight jacket by sticking to the facts, undisturbed by poetry and myth, including those produced by the architect himself.” This proved to be challenging; Fehn wasn’t personally concerned with archiving his work, and the internationally collaborative nature of the project made the search daunting. At first, Langdalen recounted, the only extant drawings of the pavilion were Fehn’s original competition drawings. However, after contacting the son of the Danish architect who had supervised the construction, “miraculously we found all the structural and all the construction drawings, in this humid damp cellar, and we were able to scan them.”

Adrian Forty remarked on the uniqueness of the geopolitical collaboration, saying “there’s no other pavilion in the biennale like this and, actually, there are very few buildings in the world, I think, which are owned by several nations,” and wondered “to what extent this is a building that has attracted myths, myths just stick to it.” Lending may have preemptively answered, concluding her presentation by saying: “We have written a nerdy archival account on a canonical building designed by a famous architect. Looking only at the building and the archival documents pertaining to it, somehow I believe allowed us to undermine the obvious and I hope new views are emerging.”