Japanese Temporariness in Norwegian Systems Architecture
Paper for the DOCOMOMO 2020+1 “Inheritable Resilience,”
Tokyo, Japan,
August 29, 2021.
Tokyo, Japan,
August 29, 2021.
In the 1950s, the dynamically changing post-WWII world placed new demands on architecture that could no longer be static. The Nordic tradition of building with timber was modified to fit the image of a new modernity, rethought with industrial technology. Nordic architects travelled further abroad and fostered intellectual connections with their colleagues in Europe and Japan. New systems thinking and ideas of growth and change emerged in Norwegian architectural discourse. This paper studies how these new ideas found their expression in the design of “regional” modern housing in Norway in the 1950s-60s through two specific examples: Arne Korsmo’s cluster houses at Planetveien and Skjetten housing development, designed as a collaborative effort. Both projects rethink the traditional use of timber for residential construction within new industrial conditions and accommodate ideas of modularity, temporariness and growth from two different standpoints: one of a singular hyper-designed architectural object with custom-made flexible solutions and another appropriating industrial production to offer a solution general enough able to accommodate growth and change in the context of mass-housing. While the Japanese inspiration for the Planetveien houses was more direct, it was nevertheless a perception of Japanese culture, rethought through Korsmo’s own aesthetic experiences and adapted to the conditions of Norwegian construction in the 1950s. Skjetten project, with its “genetic” design, drew more indirectly on the general ideas of additive architecture, growth and change that emerged simultaneously, specifically articulated in Maki’s Group Form. Translation of intellectual ideas is a complex field of inquiry on its own, and the impulses can be impossible to decipher directly. This paper complicates the narrative of post-WWII modernism, where the two projects serve as litmus papers to detect diverse regional adaptations of the late-modernist ideas of architecture of transformation and change.