Photo finish: carefully inserted into a historic naval warehouse, this photography museum has an enthralling spatial variety.

Sverre Fehn's career has been punctuated by distinguished and thoughtful museums. The archaelogical museum at Hamar (also known as the Cathedral Museum) was perhaps the first building to bring him to international attention: it was a series of bold yet sensitive concrete interventions into the stone mediaeval ruins to allow modern visitors to interpret them. More recently, Fehn's glacier museum at Fjaerdal (AR April 1993), and his memorial museum for the great Norwegian philologist Ivar Aasen at [empty set]rsta (AR September 2001) have, in their different ways, been major contributions to museum design, both responding to the landscapes in which they are set with poetic imagination and understanding.

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Fehn's latest museum, which houses Norway's national photographic collection and the Preus Fotomuseum, is on the top floor of a naval warehouse at Karljohansvern in Horten on the fjord south of Oslo (other floors are for the marine museum). As in most other countries, the navy has reorganized, leaving magnificent solid nineteenth-century buildings, to find new quarters more suitable for today's less ponderous and rapidly changing equipment.

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At Karljohansvern, the four-storey brick rectangular structure (one of a pair on a central supply dock) is vaulted throughout on a regular 4x5m grid. Originally, the roof was covered in earth and rocks to protect it from bombardment, but later in the nineteenth century that protective layer was replaced by a conventional timber-structured pitched roof. Internally, the structure is massive and elegant, almost Romanesque in its austerity and solidity--the top floor was designed to take the loads of very heavy moving canons, and even at that level, external walls are over half a metre thick. All is protected by the historic building authorities, and luckily, the Norwegian navy had looked after its inheritance very carefully.

So Fehn was faced with an interior design project. He came to it with the reverence for existing place he has always shown. Throughout, he has followed the approach first articulated in late nineteenth-century Britain by William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB): that the old should be old and the new, new; in other words, you work with what you've got.

There should be no effort to reinstate the old to some imaginary previous state, nor should there be any attempt to achieve some sort of compromise in new insertions. Fehn's distinction between old and new continues to be as clear as it was at Hamar, though of course the naval building was in a better state of preservation than the medieval ruins.

Fehn's only major insertion has been the lift shaft near the main stair in the middle of the block. You arrive at the top floor to find yourself in a glistening lobby. Fehn has lined the vaults with white glazed tiles, and the effect would be lavatorial were it not for detailing. None of the square tiles has been cut. At the arrises of the vaults, where the ceramic grid meets the three-dimensional curves, the tiles stop and the irregular gap between the two geometries is taken up with grey render flush with the tile surface, creating fretted edges emphasizing the curves. On the lobby floor are slabs of bluish grey limestone, the only time this material is used in the building.

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Looking left to the library and right to the galleries through the lobby's glass walls, the main impression is of warm brick and oak. Floors and furniture are of oiled solid timber. The original brickwork has been carefully cleaned down, repointed where necessary and left untouched as far as possible. One of the problems of dealing with such an intact and strong existing structure is the insertion of modern services. At Karljohansvern, Fehn has put all air-handling equipment in the loft over the vault and under the pitched roof. All you see of the system are a few discreet grilles in the soffits of the vaults. Electrical, lighting and sprinkler services are accommodated in V-shaped steel conduits hung down the centre of the vaults.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In the library, administration area and the gallery for the permanent collection, Fehn has formed bays on each side of the central internal street, following the plan geometry of the vaults; he has left the brickwork untreated. The galleries for temporary exhibitions are unpartitioned, with space articulated by the massive brick piers that support the vaults. Here, brickwork is whitewashed to make a neutral background for visiting photographs.

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One of Fehn's principal problems has been to reconcile the Romanesque scale of the structure with that of delicate optical apparatus. He has done so with subtlety and elegance. Round the edges of the raised oak floors is what might be called a SPAB joint, a gap edged by steel channels and, while the resulting slot may cause cleaning problems (not too bad with vacuum apparatus), it does clearly define the difference between new and old. The steel channels provide stable fixings for many of the exhibition cases. Many of these are supported on folded steel plates which, like all the other visible steel in the building, have been oil quenched. The cases, invariably at the right height for examining the objects they contain, are of the blackish, silver grey steel, glued glass and sometimes wood, materials resonating with the old and beautiful exhibits. On two occasions, cases project into the central street, like abstractions of antique bellows cameras. There is a children's museum with a camera obscura and similar optical delights, and display techniques in other bays are thoroughly and precisely adjusted to the scale of the objects shown in them.

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Fehn has conjured great variety out of a repetitive and not very large space: the result can be compared only to the work of Carlo Scarpa.

Architect

Sverre Fehn

Project team

Henrik Hille, Ervin Strandskogen, Baard Erlend Hoff

Lighting

Erco, Sill

Photographs

Guy Fehn, Henrik Hille, Astrid Roberg

PHOTOGRAPHY MUSEUM,

OSLO, NORWAY

ARCHITECT

SVERRE FEHN

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