A yard & three wooden houses

The project investigates the addition of new functions to old buildings that serve as museum objects at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural Heritage. By establishing a carpentry workshop here, we want to reconnect the historical buildings with the crafts that created them, and keep the traditional crafting skills alive for future generations.

The Norwegian Museum of Cultural Heritage at Bygdøy is the world’s oldest open-air museum of its kind and administers a great collection of buildings from cities and villages all over Norway. The craftsmen working at the museum have formidable expertise within the field of traditional crafts, but as of today most of the restoration work is done behind closed doors. One of the main objectives of this project is therefore to provide the museum a platform for spreading knowledge, not only to interested amateurs, but to professionals dealing with old buildings. By doing so, we hope the construction industry will get a knowledge boost regarding proper maintenance of traditional building stock, and help preserving our intangible cultural heritage. The collection at the museum is organized in yards, thematically connected to specific geographical regions. Our project is situated at Østlandstunet, a yard dedicated to buildings from Eastern Norway. Our task at hand is to do necessary additions to the existing building environment, to turn this yard into functioning woodworking and educational facilities, integrated in the museum’s exhibition space. When we look at the possibility for a new use of these buildings, we want to do so without leaving traces in the building stock. The buildings are museum objects and shall remain so even while serving its new program. Therefore, we consider it decisive not to add another irreversible historical layer. In our project we emphasize repair and addition as our main strategies, rather than pruning, drilling or other permanent changes to the buildings. The buildings at the museum are storytellers. Wear and tear narrates a past life once lived and tells us vivid recollections of small and big interventions that have been made to the buildings throughout the years. A big part of our work has therefore been to uncover as many of these layers as possible and let them be the deciding factors in our design. Thus, we aspire to add new functions to the old buildings without deteriorating their existing qualities, the history they inherent and the stories they tell.