observation posts

This is a brief of a text by prof. urb. Knut Eirik Dahl on our Lofoten projects, that we think is very beautiful - today's little gift to you:

Observation posts in the landscape

“My personal favourite to win, however, would be the Norwegian State Road Administration. Forum AID documented their Tourist Roads project in issue 3.06, such an extremely unconventional and extensive project that during the ten years it has been going on has stimulated a whole new generation of architects.”
Mark Isitt, former editor in chief for Forum AID magazine, on the Forum AID award 2007

70°N arkitektur was represented in the exhibition “Detour” at Norsk Form in 2006 with three projects in Vestvågøy and Austvågøy, Lofoten Islands - one birds observation building, one cyclists’ rest space and one rest area, given form as respectively two small towers and one linear field in the landscape.

The italian architect Franco Purini wrote many years ago a text in Casabella on the menaces to the italian landscape and proposed a (mental) network of observation posts to protect it. The projects in Lofoten can be seen as such posts. The Tourist Routes project as a whole can be seen as such a network. It is this larger idea behind this national project that stimulates the architects to do their utmost.

The projects appear as small scenes on the surface – landscape condensation in built form.

These three projects can and should be seen as ‘a body of work”. They are unbelievably beautiful and will become even more beautiful with the time, and take upon them new qualities. Everybody who keeps up to date have noticed that these three projects are published and discussed in international press, whenever norwegian architecture is presented outside the country’s borders.

It is a global appeal in our time in these simplified constructions, barely visible but so present – on the site.