Hamar Bispegard Museum

Today I went to Hamar, a little town a couple train hours north of Oslo. It’s just east of Lillehammer, which was the site of the 1994 Winter Olympics. In Hamar is one of Sverre Fehn’s best works, the Hedmark’s Museum. It is an archeology museum as an intervention into an old farm, which was, in turn, built on top of a ruined Bishops house. Fehn’s intervention is simple and brilliant. He lifts the modern day path off the ground with elegant concrete trays so that the museum goers walk above the excavations. The concrete tray breaks out into the inner courtyard and sweeps around to the entrance. There are several layers to this building, both historic and imposed by Fehn. It is the building that suggested my thesis and it remains an inspiration for the ideas that I am pursuing while I’m here. I feel fortunate that it is so close and that I will get to visit it on several occasions over the next several months. Here are a few photos from the museum.












These two are special for my German friend Armin, who I will hopefully see in Munich at Octoberfest in September. These are hundred-year-old fishing poles.





I apologize for only having photos of the one building. I saw a couple of cool things in Hamar that I intended to take photos of - including the famous ice rink from the Olympics that looks like an over turned Viking ship. But I got carried away taking photos at the museum and my battery ran out of gas. I charged it last night so it was full and I got 250 shots of Hedmark’s museum (and I wasn’t near finished getting everything I wanted). But since this my first full on digital camera I didn’t realize that the battery life would be associated with the number of photos. So even though I got a couple of gigs worth of memory cards, I can still only take 250 at a go before charging the battery. Well, 500 now since I bought another. I suppose this is obvious and I should have realized, but I didn’t. It made me cuss out loud when the light started flashing “low battery….low battery”.

In other news, I get to move. Grünerløkka, H0304. I’ll let you guys know how it turns out. Here are all the upsides to this: It’s within spitting distance of the Architecture school. It’s in a park on the Akerselva river. It’s a street over from an awesome little neighborhood. It’s very close to downtown. It’s in an old silo and the rooms are round. Some of the downsides: It’s $50 more a month and there might not be Internet in my room. The first of these is fine; the second would be a pain in the ass. But I figure I can work it out. At any rate, it’s pretty exciting. It means, however, I’ll have a different phone number and mailing address, which I’ll let you know if you want to send me fun things in the mail or drunk call late at night.