Panoramas of Style Author(S): Mari Hvattum Reviewed Work(S): Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives Panoramas of Style Author(s): Mari Hvattum Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 70, No. 2 (June 2011), pp. 190-209 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2011.70.2.190 . Accessed: 18/09/2012 08:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of California Press and Society of Architectural Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. http://www.jstor.org Figure 1 First test-run on the Main Line, with Christiania in the background, xylograph (from Illustreret Nyhedsblad, 1853) JSAH7002_04.indd 190 5/11/11 10:49 AM Panoramas of Style Railway Architecture in Nineteenth-century Norway mari hvattum Oslo School of Architecture and Design he railway came late to Norway. The first rail line architecture, providing fuel to the never-ending debates opened in 1854, almost thirty years after the Stock- about nationhood and national expression that characterized Tton–Darlington railroad had opened in northern the nineteenth century. The unassuming architecture of England (Figure 1). Yet after a slow start, due to Norway’s nineteenth-century railway stations is thus a useful lens challenging topography and general poverty, some twelve through which to observe the ways in which nature, nation, railway lines were built between 1862 and 1882, when a re- modernity, and history, were represented, negotiated, and cession put a momentary halt to development. In this twenty- constructed in nineteenth-century Norway, and how archi- year period, more than 160 stations were constructed, each tectural style took part in their construction. For while with a comprehensive building program consisting of pas- “style” to twentieth- (and twenty-first-) century ears still senger facilities, station parks, storage buildings, and dwell- rings with unmelodic discord against the establishment of ings—sometimes even hotels.1 modernist criticism, the nineteenth century used style to ar- As everywhere else in Europe, this was an astonishing ticulate the intricate web of memories, traditions, allegiances, development, not only introducing a new economy of trade and aspirations of a complex cultural world. Nineteenth- and transport, but bringing in its wake a radical transforma- century railway architecture provides a particularly good tion of the built environment. A new architectural expression example of this. emerged that in time would come to dominate not only rail- There are some missing links in the study of early Nor- way architecture for generations to come, but also Norwegian wegian railway architecture because the sources are few; nineteenth-century architecture in general. Contemporary most of the contracts, briefs, and other documents that could critics spoke about the “railway style” as something conta- tell about the commissioning of the stations are lost. In con- gious; it spread like a “disease” and was adopted, imitated, temporary railway literature the station buildings are little and modified in practically every Norwegian hamlet and discussed, least of all their architectural appearance.3 The farmstead.2 Although based on international precedents, the railway architects seldom wrote, and there is little direct tes- railway style became—paradoxically—a new national timony about architectural expression. Even the buildings themselves are missing: very few of the early stations still Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 70, no. 2 (June 2011), 190–209. ISSN exist, and most survivors are radically altered. However, 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2011 by the Society of Architectural Historians. there is a fairly comprehensive collection of architectural All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, drawings in the Norwegian State Railway’s archives, and an http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2011.70.2.190. abundance of lively material chronicles the reception of the JSAH7002_04.indd 191 5/11/11 10:49 AM new railway as a cultural and architectural phenomenon.4 Musing on the shattering of time and space, the anonymous Newspapers, journals, and guidebooks eagerly followed the author—“a member of parliament,” no less—echoed a figure development of the railway, and the opening of new stations of thought typical of the time.7 Annihilating distance, con- often made the headlines. Poets, politicians, and scientists quering and coordinating time, the railway stood as a symbol wrote about the railway development, and although archi- of modern man’s mastery of nature—the victory of enlight- tecture was not their primary concern, their texts say much enment and reason—international and boundary-breaking. about the cultural ambitions that were associated with the As the poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje put it: “It is man’s railway in this period. Together with the heated architectural thought that here, creator-like, has blown life into dead debates played out in public and professional publications of lumps of earth, making coal and water, fire and iron his ser- the time, the material provides an eloquent testimony to the vants.”8 A distinct aesthetic sensibility accompanied this vic- architectural ideals of mid-nineteenth-century Norway. torious sentiment and celebrated the aesthetic quality of the great railway machinery—the crowding, the noise, the speed. J. M. W. Turner’s famous Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great “The Entry of Civilization into Our Country” Western Express (1845) provides a dazzling reminder of this From the very beginning, the railway in Norway was sur- fascination—a sweeping illustration, as Michael Freeman rounded by contradictory aspirations. On the one hand, it observes, “of the march of technology, of renewal, of re- was to open a backward and provincial country to the mod- form.”9 Turner may have been an early observer of this ern world and connect it to modern European civilization. drama, but he was not alone. Two years before Turner’s On the other, it was seen as a way to build national identity. iconic painting, the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen As a modern technological system tying rural Norway to an confessed to “railway fever” and described with awestruck international network, the railway represented a global mo- fascination the sensuous spectacle of the railway station: dernity. As a national institution, however—built and run by a (near) sovereign Norwegian state—it was steeped in na- I stared at these carriages, the locomotives, the loose cars, the tionalist ambition.5 Both sides were manifest in the railway wandering chimneys and God knows what: they ran as in a building program and its architecture (Figure 2). magical world in among each other; everything seemed to have A little poem, published in the newspaper Morgenbladet legs! And now this steam and buzzing, combined with the con- immediately after the opening of the first Norwegian rail line gestion and struggle for space, this stench of paraffin, the rhyth- in 1854, expresses the triumphant internationalism of mid- mical beating of the machines, the squeaking and snorting of nineteenth-century railway enthusiasts: “Now Hills and Val- the exhaling steam, all exaggerating the impression . one leys flatten/Now Time and Space dissolve/Your Speech can, imagines falling over, breaking arms and legs, exploding into the with the Speed of Thought/Fly all around the Globe.”6 air, or being crushed by a colliding row of carriages.10 Figure 2 Georg Andreas Bull, Ask Station, Randsfjord line, 1868 (photo: C. A. Pihl. JMF–11011, Norwegian Railway Museum, Hamar) 192 JSAH / 70:2, J U N E 2 011 JSAH7002_04.indd 192 5/11/11 10:49 AM Half exhilarated, half terrified, Andersen—much like of routes depend on geological surveys, the railway opened Charles Dickens and Emile Zola—depicted the railway as a the country to view in a radical sense, making the Norwegian boundary-breaking machinery that did away with local dif- landscape available for both practical and aesthetic exploita- ferences.11 In the Norwegian debate, however, the new uni- tion. Moreover, because of its large building program, the formity seemed a cause for celebration. Norway’s first railway seemed to offer an unprecedented opportunity to railway director, Carl Abraham Pihl, for instance, envi- craft a new and distinct architectural expression: a national sioned the railway bringing about an “unprecedented expan- architecture sprung, it was envisioned, from particular Nor- sion of human communication” and having “quite an wegian topography and traditions.17 Invested with such wide- exceptional impact on cultural development and enlighten- ranging aspirations, the new railway architecture was charged ment.”12 It was an “unbroken chain, linking the whole world with the contradiction-ridden task of fusing the international together,” and represented no less than “the entry of civili- and the national, modernity and origins, into a whole. zation into our country.”13 Parallel to the celebration of the railway as something modern, rational, and boundaryless, however, ran the oppo- The Main Line: Christiania–Eidsvold site idea, namely, that the railway was a symbol of, and vehicle The stations along the first Norwegian railway line between for, the nation.14 Of course, the railway’s role in national eco- Christiania (now Oslo) and Eidsvold were designed by Hein- nomic development was extremely important.