Paper for the 14th triennial NORDIK art
history conference, Helsinki, Finland,
20 Novermber 2025.
history conference, Helsinki, Finland,
20 Novermber 2025.
In the early days of January 1973, many Norwegian newspapers spotted an exciting announcement: a new Norwegian Housing Development Company, NORHOUSE A/S, was formed, bringing together the efforts of five Norwegian construction companies. Of these, Block Watne and Moelven Brug specialised in timber prefabrication, while Edelbetong, Norcem and Norwegian Contractors were material producers of concrete and its synthetic composites, also engaged with large housing and construction projects. The main reasoning behind the new company argued that the Norwegian building industry had amassed significant experience with cheap housing and municipal construction in the post-war period. Now, this Norwegian “know-how” and building technology could be exported to developing countries to address pressing social issues. NORHOUSE corporation was then to mimic the heavy bureaucratic structures at home and provide a “full-package” deal, delivering not only cheap housing schemes but furnishing both materials and expertise and even turn-key financing solutions for state clients to pay for such developments. Among the first projects was a 6,000-unit housing development in Ivory Coast, complete with a new Siporex-concrete factory built in Abidjan. Moelven was contracted for 2,000-unit prefabricated housing projects based on local timber resources in Kenya and Zambia, while Block Watne investigated potential housing designs for Indonesia and Malaysia.
Equipped with original archival sources of NORHOUSE corporation, this contribution is then particularly interested in how prefabricated housing technology was mobilised in the 1970s as a tool of Norwegian foreign aid and a potentially profitable business franchise. Through case studies of specific housing projects by NORHOUSE, the paper scrutinises what happens when architecture is set at the overlap between the universalist aspiration of technological and business export and the local specificity of housing problems. By doing so, it suggests a more critical reading of Norwegian prefabricated housing export, providing a global perspective on the shared Nordic heritage.