NORWEGIAN ROOTS.

The museum to Ivar Aasen, the man who distilled a new national language for the emerging Norwegian nation, is carved out of his native hillside in the west country. Linguistically, Norway is a curious country, with only about four and a half million inhabitants scattered thinly along its huge length. Traditionally, to the south-east and Oslo, they speak Bokmal or Riksmal, the old official language inherited from the long and much-disliked Danish rule of the country. It is a tongue similar to Danish, except that most letters are pronounced (instead of the small proportion of them that feature in spoken language south of the Skagerrak). In the west and elsewhere in rural areas, Nynorsk (New Norwegian) tends to predominate. It was constructed by one man, Ivar Aasen, during the mid nineteenth century, the age when all small European countries under imperial rule were struggling to rediscover (or invent) roots of their particular cultures. Denmark was made to give up Norway to Sweden in 1814, but full independence was achieved (peacefully) only in 1905.

Between those dates, patriotic scholars from Bosnia to Finland, Ireland to Bohemia, were studying their own folk tales. Architects, fine artists and writers were evolving the buildings, murals and poems of National Romanticism. Aasen travelled indefatigably in Norway's west country, collating dialects of the widely separated fjord communities, and relating them to the structure of Old Norse. His Nynorsk can be quite easily understood by people who were brought up to speak Riksmal but it is considerably different -- for instance, it has three noun genders instead of only two. Whereas Ibsen wrote in virtual Danish, a distinguished literature emerged in the new language at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Now, the state has decided to celebrate Aasen's achievements with a museum built next to his family homestead at Orsta, a remote rural commune in More og Romsdal on the west coast, about half-way between Bergen and Trondheim. Sverre Fehn, one of the grand old men of Norwegian architecture, who has built distinguished museums throughout his career, decided that the place should grow out of its hillside, and open to the magnificent views south-east over the green fields of the valley towards the much darker green of the forests on burly ice-rounded mountains. He cut a long, straight slot into the slope parallel to the contours. In section, the museum has two levels, with the upper one in two heights, the taller one against the slope, from which grass rolls over its curved roof.

You enter at the top level, and rapidly see the point of the different heights, for the back of the building, under the hill, is flooded with light from a generous clerestory. The front of this level is taken up with domestic-sized spaces, devoted to showing the great lexicographer's life: his furniture, personal possessions, an account of his travels, and of course, his books, the Nynorsk grammar and dictionary. All this could have been conventional and twee: little facsimile rooms arranged in a row. But in fact, the spaces are defined by walls inflected in both plan and section, so although the spaces seem right for Aasen's books and desk and chairs, they emphasize their nature, as a conventional orthogonal layout could not. Angling the walls in plan also creates generous broad bays between the displays from which you can calmly contemplate the landscape in which Aasen grew up: the views that inspired his lifelong search for authenticity and identity.

At the west end of the long route, a void opens down to the lower floor. This is the library, quite a small space, but one of the most dramatic, in which books by Nynorsk writers stretch up towards the curve at the back of the building that is flooded by light from the clerestory. The remainder of the lower level is much more conventional, with a row of offices looking out over the valley, and storage against the hill.

The biggest space is the auditorium, which is entered from the upper level and falls down the hill, roughly following its natural slope. Its calm timber-lined interior is made dramatic by a light chute over the stage which takes north luminance and pours it down, partly reflected from the sloping end wall. Externally, this becomes a massive inclined plane on which Aasen's signature is scribbled in steel as if on an advertisement hoarding. This is the only gratuitously ostentatious gesture in the building, and is an unusually literal move for Fehn, whose buildings have so far commented mutely and powerfully on their essence and context.

The sloping wall is made of beton brut, like the rest of the building. The material is appropriate: it reflects on the log structures of Aasen's family farm next door; it is almost geological in feeling, allowing the building to marry its hill; it is a modern material (well, at least twentieth century). And it allows precision as well as mass. Fehn's handling of the delicate nuances of threshold, for instance, stand comparison with Scarpa's. Large surfaces are quietly enlivened by the patterns of shuttering boards and by drifts of small casting flaws. Fehn has never tried to achieve the perfection of concrete to which Lasdun or Zumthor have aspired; concrete for him has a nature of its own which should be allowed to express itself.

A similar robust but delicate sensitivity controls all aspects of the interiors. From desk, to book, to spectacle case, each object is shown in circumstances that unobtrusively emphasize its nature. Glass, wood and metal display cases are specially created for the smaller exhibits. These cabinets work as part of the architecture, rather than against it. Here, unlike the glacier museum at Fjaerdal (AR April 1993), Fehn was allowed to design the exhibitions as well as the building. The result is a generous, austere, modest, intricate, kindly and deeply rooted monument to Aasen, who hoped to enhance all those characteristics in his nation.