Short description:

This book examines ten select projects to illuminate Fehn?s approach to the city, the embodiment of that thinking in his designs, and the broader lessons those efforts offer for better understanding the relationship between architecture and urban life.

Long description:

The urban attentions of Pritzker Laureate Sverre Fehn (1924?2009) are extensive, but as yet virtually unexplored. This book examines ten select projects to illuminate Fehn?s approach to the city, the embodiment of that thinking in his designs, and the broader lessons those efforts offer for better understanding the relationship between architecture and urban life, with unignorable implications for emergent urban architecture and its address of sociological and ecological crises. Wary of large-scale planning proposals or the erasure of existing urban patterns, Fehn offered an uncommon and profoundly vibrant approach to urbanism at the scale of the single architectural project. His writings, constructed buildings, competition entries, and lectures suggest opportunities for reinvigorating architecture?s engagement with the city, and provoke a rethinking of concepts foundational to its theorization. What is the nature of urbanity? What is the relationship of urbanity to the natural world? What is the role of architecture in the provision and sustenance of urban life? While exploring this territory will expand our knowledge of an architect central to key developments of late modernism, the range of the book and the arguments developed therein delineate far broader aims: a fuller understanding of architecture?s urban promise.

"What if a good urban solution doesn?t involve ?fitting into existing conditions? but adding a clear and articulate voice to barely audible communications about ways of living that could be less wasteful, more humane, and just? Read this forward-looking book to discover modern architecture?s positive contribution to the city and the cultures it embodies."

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"This is a thesis that takes architectural scholarship and criticism to an entirely new level, in part because of the exceptionally sensitive talent and inventive energy of Sverre Fehn, and in part because of Anderson?s comparable sensitivity and profound erudition, influenced as it has been by the architectural phenomenologies of Dalibor Vesely and David Leatherbarrow. This is a truly important work."

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments. Chapter 1 Fehn in the City: ?What makes this all so alive?. Chapter 2 Opened Ground. Chapter 3 Sverre Fehn?s Ambient Urbanity. Chapter 4 Sverre Fehn, the City, and the Architecture of Participation. Chapter 5 More Oslo. Afterword. Appendix 1. Appendix 2. Index.