Pritzker winner Sverre Fehn dies: obituary by bd Architects website

architect/artist: Sverre Fehn
obituary title: Pritzker winner Sverre Fehn dies
obituary compilation no: T-13
format: Text
date: 26 February, 2009
appeared in: bd Architects website
writer:

photo by:

courtesy: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=426&storycode=3134815&channel=577&c=2&encCode=000000000193dd09

Obituary Details:



Pritzker winner Sverre Fehn dies

Norwegian Priztker Prize winner Sverre Fehn died on Monday at the age of 84.

The former professor of architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture — where he studied for his diploma in the 1940s — won the prize in 1997.

Fehn, who began his career in the office of Jean Prouvé in Paris, was Norway’s best known architect. His breakthrough came with the Økern Home for the Elderly, in Oslo (1955), while he found international fame with his design for the Norwegian Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition.

His reputation was sealed in the 1960s with such projects as the 1962 Nordic Pavilion built for the Venice Biennale and the Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway.

When he won the Priztker Prize, the jury said: “The architecture of Sverre Fehn is a fascinating and exciting combination of modern forms tempered by the Scandinavian tradition and culture from which it springs.

“Eschewing the clever, the novel and the sensational, Fehn has pursued his version of 20th century modernism steadily and patiently for the past 50 years. He has displayed a virtuosity and creativity that now ranks him among the leading architects of the world.”

Fehn specialised in designing museums, such as the Norwegian Glacier Museum (1991) in Fjærland and most recently the Norwegian Museum of Architecture, which opened in 2007 in a refurbished 1830s bank building that was given a new separate exhibition pavilion.

He also designed several acclaimed exhibitions, and private houses including the Villa Busk in Bamble, Norway.

Fehn was also awarded the 1997 Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal and the 1993 gold medal of the French Academy of Architecture. In 2001 he became the first recipient of the Grosch medal, the Norwegian architectural honour.

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