Fantastic Norway

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Two young architects in a red camper take on Norway’s architectural ills.

Håkon Matre Aasarød and Erlend Blakstad Haffner roused community support to preserve a firehouse that was scheduled for demolition. The building and the adjacent town square, they had learned, were going to be turned over to a shopping-center developer. Aasarød and Haffner returned to the site repeatedly during the school year, and ultimately proposed adapting the brick tower into a regional contemporary art headquarters. “We found this more interesting than school,” Haffner says, “and decided that we would go into architecture to make positive social changes.”
A year later the newly minted graduates established Fantastic Norway, making field trips their MO. With a beat-up car pulling a Bjølseth camper, Aasarød and Haffner spent 30 months traveling to a dozen cities, identifying local ailments—an underused public space, a preexisting design that had gone sour—and inviting residents into their mobile office to brainstorm solutions. “People feel threatened by com­pletely new ideas because often they don’t participate in the process,” Haffner says. Listening, Fantastic Norway’s success suggests, is good business.

TXT: http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3094

http://www.fantasticnorway.no/