winter hiatus (polar night) – mammoth // building nothing out of something

winter hiatus (polar night)

[Fantastic Norway‘s 2005 installation “Polar Night”, built in the Arctic town of Bodø.  A total of 40 daylight lamps — bulbs of the sort which are designed to simulate natural sunlight and used in therapy — were attached to fiberglass panels, lighting a public square during the polar night, and producing an event which attracted citizens into public spaces which are usually abandoned during the lengthy darkness of the polar night.]

[Fantastic Norway’s signature caravan is visible in the bottom right corner of the final image; for years, architecture school dropouts Håkon Matre Aasarød and Erlend Blakstad Haffner traveled Norway in their caravan, moving from town to town reading the power structures of municipalities, meeting with both key individuals they identified as well as interested members of the public, writing local newspaper columns to describe their intentions and utility to the community, and developing clients willing to finance their projects.  Though their practice has evolved away from its early itinerant character, their combination of public interface and the curation of clients remains, in the very best sense, unsolicited architecture.]

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