Toward a Democratic Architecture: Norwegian Experiments in Timber
Essay for the edited volume Between Conventional and Experimental,
Leuven University Press, 2024.
Leuven University Press, 2024.
Imagine if a house customised to your individual needs could be ordered through an iPhone application and delivered neatly packaged to your door, accompanied by a set of comprehensive instructions for self-assembly. This utopian promise of an amicable collective of individualised desires unified by a system of industrially produced components appears to be a brainchild of the current times. However, its social aspirations and formal language find their roots in the 1960s Nordic experiments with new typologies of mass housing built by the Norwegian prefabrication company Moelven Brug in the Oslo region in the late 1960s. Driven by a similar ambition to reconcile the pragmatism of mass production and the flexibility of individual choice, the company designed a system of prefabricated timber elements that could accommodate different plan layouts and house designs in mass housing. Future dwellers could choose from the many spatial potentialities and adjust and modify their homes as their family needs change.
Although Moelven, the company behind this building system, is well known in Norway for its prefabricated catalogue homes, few are aware of its midcentury experiments with flexible mass housing. In this chapter, I attempt to correct this shortcoming while telling a story of a specifically Norwegian alternative to the postwar European mass housing model. Initially driven by the pragmatics of scaled production, in the 1960s, Moelven’s prefabrication system found a curious intersection with a changing architectural discourse that shifted the role of the architects and delegated design agency to the future dwellers. The planners of flexible housing projects in the early 1970s captured the spirit of Nordic pragmatism, negotiating the embedded cultural tension between individual choice and collective good and the apparent dichotomy between economic construction and good architecture available for all.
Through a brief historiography of Moelven’s projects, this essay charts how seemingly anonymous and everyday built environments of large social housing estates harbour a wealth of cultural histories and idealistic aspirations of better, more egalitarian architecture accessible to all and a more democratic society based on horizontal decision-making.