Steven Holl made his first sketches for the Knut Hamsun Center, in the municipality of Hamarøy, Norway, in 1994. But it was not until 2008, 14 years later, that construction started. During this long gestation period the building entered the collective consciousness to the point that it was as if it really existed — it is said that tourists ventured to the site to find no building at all. Seventeen years on, the center is complete, installed, and is being used for its intended purposes. But it’s what has happened in the intervening years, since Holl’s first visit, that has shaped the building into the important cultural center it is today.
The physical journey to Hamarøy, 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is also arduous. The passage, involving hours of air, sea, and road travel through breathtaking scenery, is a singular one. And the arrival to this awe-inspiring place, with its wooded hills leading down to the water’s edge and its sharp mountainous backdrop, is deeply rewarding. An obvious response to the natural beauty would be to make a humble gesture with a quiet building. However, the challenge of designing a museum dedicated to one person is that it must not simply serve as a vessel for objects, but also evoke the spirit of that person and his work. Knut Hamsun is a troubled figure in the Norwegian memory. A modernist author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920, he was celebrated as a hero. But in his later years he sympathized with Hitler, provoking national feelings of betrayal. On Holl’s first site visit he made a series of sketches. “It was a kind of project that comes to you all at once, almost like an intuition,” he says. Envisioning a tower in the forest, Holl based his ideas on the author’s first four novels and developed the concept for the center as “Building as a Body: Battleground of Invisible Forces,” a reference to Hamsun’s 1890 novel, Hunger, which chronicles a starving man’s descent into madness. With this project the architect was interested in depicting all dimensions of the author (who himself wrote about human imperfection) — both his unfettered creativity and his profound weakness.
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