Exploring Scandinavia

The 19th century witnessed a mass exodus of Scandinavians in search of a better life in the New World.

“Potatoes, peace and vaccination” were blamed for a population explosion at home which contributed to an outflow of 300,000 Danes (1820–1920) 800,000 Norwegians (1825–1925) and one million Swedish emigrants (1868–1914) – a quarter of the Swedish population.

The new settlers sent back glowing accounts of their lives in America, and money to support those left behind. These signs of prosperity and other factors such as The United States Homestead Act of 1862, which promised land almost free to settlers who dared to travel west, encouraged others to follow.

Sweden was, for example, struck by crop failures and famines in the late 1860s that stimulated ro massive emigration. High unemployment and a lack of open land for new farms caused increasing numbers of Norwegian and Danes to emigrate to the US.

Scandinavian immigrants settled primarily in the Midwest. Norwegians favored Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota. Danes settled primarily in the agricultural regions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Kansas, while Swedes settled across the entire upper Midwest. Few Scandinavians made their way to the West Coast.

While approximately 125,000 Scandinavians came to the United States before the Civil War, the majority arrived between 1865 and World War I. Many Scandinavians were lured to the United States after receiving “American letters” from friends and family that described fruitful land and employment opportunities. Prepaid transportation tickets from relatives and friends often helped finance the trip to the New World.

One survey reported 65 Norwegians in Washington Territory and 47 in Oregon in 1870. By the 1880s, however, the railroads had reached the Pacific Northwest and within a decade, a significant number of Scandinavian organizations and churches had been established in Tacoma, Astoria, the Yakima Valley, and other areas environmentally familiar to the Nordic immigrants.  Evidence suggests that Scandinavians felt a kinship with the natural surroundings and economic opportunities in the Pacific Northwest. More than 150,000 Scandinavians settled in the region between 1890 and 1910 ― many attracted to the fishing, logging, and farming industries.

The Great Scandinavian Exodus, written by Tor Kjolberg

All images, family photos, courtesy Lars Andersen

Since its inception three years ago, the Architizer A+Awards has come to represent the very best architecture in the world. Reiulf Ramstad Architects, responsible for the Community Church in Knarvik north of Bergen was announced winners of Popular Choice last month.

“This year’s winners represent the best new architecture, interiors and products,” writes the A+Awards Winners Jury, consisting of over 300 industry leaders. Reiulf Ramstad Architects were recognized at the Architizer A+Awards Gala on May 14 in New York City.

The new Community Church in Knarvik, located on the scenic west-coast of Norway north of Bergen, is built on a privileged site overlooking the cultural landscape and local town centre. The building is carefully adapted to an existing hillside between built and natural environment, providing the church with an inspiring context of the surrounding heath landscape. Its distinctive and innovative character and central location makes it a landmark in the community, to be inviting and inclusive for all people to cultivate their faith throughout the week.

The church signals its function with a sacral dignity and recognisable form, where the church spire, sanctuary and chapel are emphasised by ascending roof planes. Inspired by the local tradition of Norwegian stave churches, the building utilizes clear and elemental geometries, materials and constructions. The compact building volume is split into two stories on a rectangular plan, separating the sacred spaces above from the cultural and administrative functions below. An internal “church square” connects the two levels with an atrium stair into a continuous space, and may be joined or separated from the sanctuary with sliding glass walls to accommodate more than 500 people.

Wood is the key material of the project, expressed in the homogeneous cladding of pre-weathered pine heartwood and mirrored by the light-coloured pine finish on all interior surfaces. The building permits daylight into its volume through lancet-reminiscent tall and narrow windows, splayed in plan to maximise admittance and reduce glare. At night, the warm glow of the interior reveals the activities of its religious and cultural events.

The church aspires to provide a platform for a safe upbringing for children and youth, to become a local venue for gatherings and faith, and to facilitate art, music and cultural development. The Community Church Knarvik has an architectural expression, spatial solutions and materiality which unites religion, culture and the sitespecific
context into a whole.

Photographs by Reiulf Ramstad Architects and Hundven-Clements Photography.

A+ Award to the Community Church in Knarvik, Norway, written by Tor Kjolberg

On the outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark, surrounded by woods, the new Moesgaard Museum (MOMU), designed by the world famous Danish architects, Henning Larsen Architects (HLA), offers a new perspective on the role of the museum as a public space.

The past is brought to fascinating life at the new Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus.

Moesgård is an eighteenth-century manorial complex in open countryside a few kilometres south of Aarhus, the main city of Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. Expect the past to become alive and the people in the exhibits to step forward giving visitors with a better understanding of the past and how we arrived at where we are in the present.

Since the 1950s, this has been the home of Aarhus University’s departments devoted to the human past, and also home to Moesgård Museum, an independent body that has always been closely integrated with teaching and research.

Moesgaard Museum, which  has been awarded two Michelin stars in the Michelin tourist attraction’s guide, appeals to visitors of all ages whilst also creating a sense of bonding, fellowship and shared experience across generations. On Tuesday 14 March, Moesgaard Museum was selected as Jury Award winner in the Museum category of the annual Architizer A+ Awards.

Extensive fundraising has enabled long-laid plans for a revitalized museum to be realized. After a period of closure, Moesgaard Museum reopened its doors to the public in October 2014, situated in an exciting new building with a new acronym—MOMU—and even a new spelling (the citizens of Aa/Århus have argued politely for years about their city’s name, and the same dilemma extends to Moesgård/gaard).

The evolutionary stairway at Moesgaard Museum is not only a key element of the architecture, which leads to the various exhibitions of the museum, it is also very much an opportunity for you to see where we human beings originate from.

The new museum has been constructed in what were previously green fields, 200m or so from the manor house complex that housed its predecessor.

Northern Europe now has a dazzling new museum of prehistory and ethnography, combining its responsibilities as the regional archaeological repository with an original public face for its wider collections, presented in one of the most strikingly designed new-builds of recent decades. We recommend you to pay it a visit.

You may also want to read: The First Inhabitants in Scandinavia

A Danish Flagship Museum, written by Admin

A new novel by Norwegian crime fiction master Jo Nesbø is an electrifying thriller set in Oslo, Norway, in the 1970s.

Blood on Snow is the story about Olav, “the fixer”, and Nesbø lets him introduce himself standing over the man he just has shot in the chest and neck, blood dripping on the snow. This novel is about an unusually complicated contract killer whose unexpected capacity for love is as far-reaching as his talent for murder.

In his own eyes Olav is not a bad guy. “I have a weak, sensitive nature,” he says “so I have to stay well away from drugs”. Nesbø writes convincingly through the eyes of a hired killer who works for a crime boss, Hoffman, who deals in prostitution and heroin in Oslo in 1970s.

The book offers an excursion to a slightly different corner of the criminal underworld, where death and love become tangled together in the cold, dark streets of Oslo.

Blood on Snow is roughly a third of the length of Nesbø’s typical novels, which makes it move at a quicker pace. The book is also more noire than the psychologically driven Harry Hole books.

Nesbø reached the charts twice in 2014, with The Son and Police, in which the troubled alcoholic detective Harry Hole was removed from the action. We’ve been told that Warner Bros is planning to adapt Blood on Snow as a vehicle for Leonardo DiCaprio to produce and star in.

Norwegian crime author has succeeded  again! written by Tor Kjolberg