Wooden churches, managers and Fulbright scholars: glued laminated timber in 1950s Norway
Paper for the International Congress on Construction History,
Lisbon, Portugal,
July 11-16, 2021.
Lisbon, Portugal,
July 11-16, 2021.
The paper explores the introduction of glued laminated timber technology to the Norwegian construction market in the late 1950s. The paper concentrates on the activities of Norwegian construction conglomerate Moelven Brug, which in the 1950s brought back the production of laminated timber in Norway after forty years of absence in the country. Building on the work of Norwegian glulam pioneer Guttorm Brekke (1885-1980) and on state-of-the-art academic research and industry know-how from the United States, Sweden and Belgium in the post-war period, Moelven Brug quickly established itself as the market leader for laminated timber in Norway. By mapping these scholarly and professional exchanges, the paper traces the shifting ontological understanding of timber in Norway from a “natural” into a “scientific” material and its transformation into a complex assemblage of different substances subjected to control and standardisation through a series of variables and parametric values.