Fabricating a new tradition: narratives of timber in Norwegian system-building
Article for Architectural Theory Review,
vol. 25, issues 1-2, 2021.
vol. 25, issues 1-2, 2021.
Timber is an ambiguous material, saturated with implicit values of sustainability and locality, and at the same time, globally ubiquitous. This essay examines the curious moment in Norwegian architectural history when timber, long associated with tradition and its relationship to craft, became an industrial mass-production material—especially through prefabricated structures produced by a Norwegian company, Moelven Brug. By tracing the marketing narratives behind the company’s two main products—large timber housing panels and glulam beams—this essay strives to reconstruct a complex field of ideas related to building with timber. It argues that on the one hand, Moelven products reflected shifting architectural attitudes towards the wood in mid-century Norway, treating it as a ‘non-material,’ and on the other, they shaped new narratives of ‘updated tradition’ and advanced the use of engineered timber in representative building typologies. A curious by-product of a marketing narrative, the myth of updated tradition survives until today, providing a local resolution to homogeneous global typologies.