Hedmark Cathedral Museum, Hamar

SVERRE FEHN encountered Andrea Palladio after he had built a private house in Norrkóping in Sweden. The Norrkóping building is a centralised space: it is composed of four wings whose points of intersection are marked by four smaller glass wings that function as corner-windows.

Palladio told him of the development of the Villa Rotonda, of the time when the mystery of the horizon was lost: the Earth was, after all, a sphere, and it was measurable. So, with the help of Rotonda, Fehn built of the globe a labyrinth: when one sets off from one side of the house and circles the globe, one returns to a side that is exactly the same.

Fehn \s buildings tell stories. A story, a poetic idea, is the starting point of architecture. The irrational thought of life after death resulted in the exact structures of the Gothic cathedrals. Building based on calculations is a stranger to life, lacking in spirit: the structure is contained in the story, it cannot be calculated and it cannot be added to the building afterwards...[+]