Organised on two levels adapting to the terrain, the plan is compact, providing generous social spaces within a limited floor area. The upper level is comprised of smaller scale bedrooms and family rooms, whereas the lower level is a large gallery-like space structured around a stone hearth.

Completed in linseed oil painted pine with untreated birch skirting, frames and reveals – the interior is kept subtle with a character of being hand-built – promoting tactile qualities and the attractive patina developed over time.

Text provided by the architect.

The ground was left untouched so the houses floats above the rocks. Also above the rocks is it possible to walk around the houses on outdoor bridges and platforms, hung from the facade. The contrast between the sometimes rough climate and the easy summerlife was the guide to the design of the buildings. Construction of timber is covered with nearly maintenance-free materials. Painted parts are white according to the tradition of the coast.

The rounded roofs got their form from the surrounding rocks. The geometry of the plans is simple; one front room closest to the ocean for cooking, eating, and relation with people and a rear section for bedrooms and entrance hall. Large glasspanels can be slid to the side so that all rooms can be open towards the outer bridge.

The closely positioned guesthouse at 1.17 has a bedroom and a sauna. The interiors of the house is completetly covered with untreatened fir. When a low evening sun from west lightens the panel is the inner of the houses from the ocean a glowing eye catcher in a grey landscape.

Text provided by the architect.

The house is narrow, but its openings facing out are wide, giving the interior the character of a niche like shelter in the open space of the landscape. While the roof maintains a consistent elevation throughout the house, the interior floor rises and falls in accordance with the surrounding terrain. This means the height of the ceiling varies within the main spaces, which are arranged in a continuous ring around the atrium. Within this continuous space, the smaller rooms are assembled in a number of solid blocks.

Inspired by the impressive materiality of Gotland’s vernacular agricultural architecture, the masonry construction has a natural plaster colour that has been mixed with carbon black, exterior metal parts made of oxidised zinc, and oak doors as well as windows that have been treated with tar oil. The large sliding glass windows are mounted on the surface of the exterior walls, according to the same principle as many barn doors. Also the interior doors are surface‐mounted, allowing the walls to appear unbroken.

Text provided by the architect.

Over five decades later the ‘Nordic Pavilion’ (as it would only later become known) has come to reflect, consolidate and embody Nordic architectural traditions. Look a little deeper, however, and it becomes clear that Fehn actually sought to invert them entirely. In place of heavy timber beams Fehn chose slender concrete lamellae, pigmented to glow (reflecting, for one common metaphor, sunlight falling on a quilt of snow). Rather than create a closed space to shut the elements out—a typical vernacular in Norway—he completely removed two of the building’s four boundary walls. In designing the roof to be essentially open to the skies, Fehn was able to specifically control how the rain would fall into the space. In this sense, it is a building in possession of its surroundings – accepting its direct context while tentatively suggesting another, distant world.

Fehn did not seek to mimic a Nordic vernacular – the Pavilion is not an act of mimesis in the conventional sense. He sought to rewrite (as opposed to translate) something hitherto indescribable: the sense of a ‘Nordic’ architecture for the Venetian climate and situated in the uninhabited, uniquely fragmented context of the giardini of la Biennale di Venezia. Just as Walter Benjamin described the act of translation as a “mode” rather than an act,[2] Fehn recognised that the orchestration of space by assemblage is different to that of contextually grafting—and thereby crafting from, and into—a new environment.[3]

Distilling Fehn’s architectural moves into a collection of articulated elements—roof, ground, wall, stair and beam—belies its complexity as a consolidated spatial gesture. Just as the Palazzo Ducale (a ten minute journey away by water) should only be read as one part of a “metamorphosis” (in the words of Giulia Foscari[4]) between surface, object and space that comprise Piazza (and, by extension, Piazzetta) San Marco, the Nordic Pavilion is more than an assemblage of parts. It is the culmination of an orchestration of spatial ideas and atmospheric intentions between wall, ground, step, ‘roof’, landscape, light, and ‘interstitiality’ – all framed by its relationship to the topography of the site.

The grid, which might otherwise appear monotonous in its rigidity, is interrupted by a series of openings through which the three remaining internal plane trees[5]—of which there were originally seven—erupt from the ground to punctuate vertically through, up and out of the space.

During his travels through Italy which followed, Fehn became acutely aware of the different characteristics which light can take. Upon his return to Norway he was “able to recognize the distinct nature of Nordic light” like never before.[7]

Like any translator worth their salt, Fehn employed both original materials and those specific to the site—a concrete combination of white cement, white sand, and crushed white Italian marble—to sculpt a quality of light of incredible intensity, tranquility and, most importantly, steady homogeneity. He wanted to do nothing more than “construct a roof to protect the paintings and sculptures”—for the building’s first intended function was as a gallery—“from direct sunlight.”[8]

For the ‘roof,’ which would more accurately be described as a collection of light wells, Fehn designed two layers of concrete brise-soleil. These lamellae, each precisely one-metre tall and six-centimetres thin, blanket the internal space to create a plane of two-metre deep pockets set, by their width and height, at a ratio of 1:2. They stretch across the room in a single span, bracketing one another in intervals of 52.3 centimetres. Together they distil the heady, warm Mediterranean light into its ‘Nordic’ variation: at once shadeless, uniform and bright. It is a light that is “definite, but familiar”[9] and, in the words of Marco Mulazzani, provides a constant, homogenous sense of illumination.[10] In other words, a shadowless world.

[1] Marco Mullazzani, Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1887 (Milan: Electa, 2014), pp.122-126
[2] Walter Benjamin, Harry Zorn trans., The Task of the Translator in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp.70-71
[3] In other words, just because wood, brick, mortar and concrete can be found or fabricated almost anywhere, does not mean that they should be used in the same way everywhere.
[4] Guilia Foscari, Elements of Venice (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2014), pp.12-27
[5] According to Ole Gaudernack the three remaining trees within the pavilion are Celtis Australis, also known as the Mediterranean hackberry, the European Nettle Tree, or the Honeyberry).
[6] Richard Kearney, On Stories (London: Routledge, 2002) p.140 (via Neveu, On Stories: Architecture and Identity)
[7] Mark J. Neveu, On Stories: Architecture and Identity (Oslo: Arkitektur N, 02, 2008), accessed February 28, 2016, p.5
[8] Christian Norberg­ Schulz, Gennaro Postiglione, ed. Sverre Fehn: Samlede Arbeider, (Oslo: Orfeus Forlag, 1997) p.248 (via Neveu, On Stories: Architecture and Identity)
[9] Neveu, On Stories: Architecture and Identity
[10] Marco Mullazzani, Guide to the Pavilions of the Venice Biennale since 1887 (Milan: Electa, 2014), p.19

Description by Archdaily.

Everything in this project nestled in the hills of Valpolicella tells of the beauty that coexists with ingenuity. Everything speaks, paraphrasing Scarpa’s own words, of a conception of architecture as harmony, like a beautiful woman’s face, mysterious, difficult to understand and, at the same time, marvelous. The terms that make up this intricate language are the access to the villa, a crack at the same level as the roof, from which the underground rooms take light, to the floor organized in slopes that follow the slope; the surfaces of the windows which, reflecting the pools of water (a typical compositional element of Scarpa’s architecture), multiply the walls of the house, as happens in Venetian palaces, the nine giant cylindrical pillars, built with concrete, Prun and Trani stone , which support the canopy, shape the living room and underline the changes in height between living areas, kitchen, dining room and bathroom that otherwise seem without a separation. Villa Ottolenghi is a unique construction, a perfect example of how Scarpa is able to channel the relationship between natural, artificial nature and human life into his work.