Rural idyll.

This museum reinterprets the agricultural traditions of south-west Norway, using traditional materials but without sentimentality.

Jaer is rather flat, between the sea and the mountains in south-west Norway. From the earliest times, it has been a prosperous agricultural area. Quite recently, the state purchased the farm of Kvia in the Ha commune to preserve and make accessible the remains (which vary from 3000 year old grave mounds to Second World War German fortifications). The Jaer museum is the latest built addition to Kvia and is intended to present the technical developments in Norwegian agriculture over the last century. (Jaer's smithies were the main source of agricultural implements in Norway, and the farm is worked with 1950s machinery made or adapted in the area.)

The complex (which is the first phase of a larger scheme) is in three parts: an exhibition area, an auditorium and a workshop. All three are irregular in plan, and have roofs of heavily creosoted timber boarding with shallow pitches in two directions; along the ridges are long triangular lanterns. With walls of fieldstone and lightly tarred vertical boarding, the buildings have overtones of barns, or even, with the hump of their roofs, ancient hows. But there is no deliberate attempt to copy the past: no farm building ever looked like these, and no grave-mound has a glass ridge running over its back.

A straight stone-paved path runs west through a glass passage between the main building and the auditorium. The public entrance to the complex is from this light-filled slot: the reception area is to the right and the generous lecture theatre with its cloakroom arrangements to the left. The atmosphere of the museum proper is rather cave-like, though made light by the continuous ridge lantern and large areas of glazed wall, for instance in the cafe to the left of the entrance. Beyond the reception desk and shop is the main exhibition area, the volume of which stretches down to a basement which could be made economically because of the site's fall to the north. Down at the bottom, all manner of locally made agricultural machines are rather endearingly jumbled together. Above this pit is a mezzanine on which smaller objects are displayed.

The various parts of the interior are brought together by a double row of round laminated timber columns from which struts spring to support the rafters which are tied with steel rods into semi-trusses. The structure allows the wide span to be seen clearly, and the abstracted avenue gives order and dignity to the whole volume.

The museum addresses Norwegian culture at its most earthy, yet does so with a sure touch, and it never descends to trickery or the obvious.