Increasing academic interests to the Historical Archive of Norwegian Landscape Architecture

A scholarly visit from the United States.

Since the first blog articles published in 2018 and the exhibition in the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo early this year, the Historical Archive of Norwegian Landscape Architecture has got increasing attention from both Norwegian societies and the academia abroad. In June 2019, a researcher from the University of Pittsburgh in the United States visited the Archive to study architectural competitions in Norway from the 1950s onwards.

Doctoral student Sarah Constant in discussion with Sveinung Skjold.

The doctoral student Sarah Constant was interested in the collection of Grindaker & Gabrielsen and the collection of Sveinung Skjold (not published yet). Sarah’s research project, supervised by Dr. Gordon Mitchell, explores the intersections of architecture and rhetoric, especially many overlapping rhetorical situations involved in architectural competitions. In Norway, she located two primary archives of interest: the National Museum of Architecture in Oslo and the Historical Archive of Norwegian Landscape Architecture. Most notably, the latter contains several original competition entries from Norwegian landscape architects, such as Sveinung Skjold. Through the analysis of these competition entries and drawings, she plans to examine how architectural competitions function as a persuasive process and what the architect’s role is in that endeavor. During Sarah’s stay in the Archive, she actually met Sveinung Skjold in person, who kindly accepted the invitation, came to the Archive and explained to her his thinking process behind several competition entries. His narrative exposed a network of complicated innerworkings behind these competition entries. Sarah believes that the archival materials in tandem with Sveinung Skjold’s first-hand oral history interview provide valuable primary sources for her future scholarship on this topic!

Sarah Constant was mainly interested in original competition entries from Norwegian landscape architects.

Sarah received two grants from her home institution to travel to Norway. She plans to use the materials obtained from the archives as well as the oral history interviews in a scholarly journal article.

This post is written in collaboration with Sarah Constant.

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