Until his death in 1707, the parson poet Petter Dass wrote prolifically from the medieval church of the small shoreline farming community of Alstahaug—hard by the western slopes of Norway’s dramatic Seven Sisters mountain range. Celebrating the sacred virtues of what inhabitants refer to as “the kingdom of the thousand isles,” Dass paid reverent homage to the people and landscape of northern Norway in his most famous work, Nordlands Trompet (The Trumpet of Nordland):

Three hundred years later, Dass’s life and work are themselves dramatically celebrated and exhibited in Snøhetta’s Petter Dass Museum in Alstahaug. Addressing the growing tourist and visitor needs of the existing church—now one of only seven such preserved medieval churches in Norway—and an adjacent 18th-century parsonage, the new building’s linear volume is boldly set within an excavated cleft of the site’s dominant granite ridge; its curving, winglike roof form projects out from the ridge to overlook the fjord waters beyond.