117
Made famous by the Beatles’ 1965 hit song, and subsequently
catalyzed by Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel,
the term “Norwegian wood” has taken on a mythical
allure in international popular culture. Its commercial
appropriations today include a rock festival, a best-selling
book about firewood, a craft beer, as well as a purportedly
ethical and sustainable fashion and homewares brand – all
favoring the phrase for its allusions to something genuine,
wholesome, and natural. Whereas the appropriateness of
many of these appropriations certainly could be questioned,
the term’s universal familiarity and distinct connotations
make it an apt point of departure for exploring some of the
less-trodden trails to ecological design. Judging by today’s
discourse – whether scholarly, professional, or popular –
one might get the impression that ecological design is a
recent or flat-out ahistorical phenomenon, the result of
a new and immaculate imperative. Only by retracing key
historical trajectories, however, can we hope to arrive at a
fuller understanding of its complexities and contemporary
significance.
Just like the song and the novel, the emerging
discourse on ecological design traced in the following
bridged the local and the global, inserting the national
in the international – and vice versa. The rise of popular
environmentalism and the migration of basic ecological
ideas from the life sciences to general and professional
media in the latter half of the 1960s helped change the
meaning of internationalization in design discourse. If
hitherto primarily gauged by the local export of exquisite
NORWEGIANWOOD
TrailstoEcological
Design
KjetilFallan
118 Design Struggles
objects and the rising fame of national design heroes, internationalization
now also came to signify a new concern for
how local communities were affected by the border-defying
nature of environmental problems and a growing awareness
of the global connections underpinning our material culture
and natural ecosystem alike. In this chapter, I will trace one
of the many trajectories through the emergence of this new
understanding of design’s environmental entanglements
by following the writings and actions of the CanadianNorwegian
architect Robert Esdaile and his quest for an
ecologically founded design education and practice. Shifting
to a more literal understanding of “Norwegian wood,”
the final section examines the morality of materials in the
marked shift in the 1960s from teak to pine as the dominant
material in Norwegian furniture design.
Although Nordic design in general tends to be
associated with nature and the natural, at least when
mediated internationally,1
the trope of “nature” has been
particularly pronounced in Norway. During the heyday of
“Scandinavian Design” in the 1950s, nature was portrayed
as a sublime presence, a majestic force – a source both of
material resources and creative inspiration. The growing
acknowledgment that the serenity and purity of nature
hitherto taken for granted was now under threat, and that
design and designers were implicit in this environmental
destruction, significantly changed how nature was perceived
and invoked in design discourse. The concept of ecology,
at this very time spilling over into the public realm from
the narrower confines of the life sciences, quickly became
a favored tool amongst design professionals for rethinking
human-nature relations. Making it his life’s mission
to reform design practice and education according to
ecological principles, Robert Esdaile and his concern for
what comes “after us” represents one of the first sustained
efforts to bring an ecological, or ecologically informed,
critique to bear on design and its practices and ideologies
in a Norwegian context. Tracing Esdaile’s work leads us
along one of many trails through the extensive and dense
Norwegian wood(s), exemplifying how ecological design
grew from many different roots, and that one of its main
characteristics is the dual attention to the local and the
global.
1. Niels Peter Skou and Anders
V. Munch, “New Nordic
and Scandinavian Retro:
Reassessment of Values and
Aesthetics in Contemporary
Nordic Design,” Journal of
Aesthetics & Culture 8, no. 1
(2016), 6–8.
FindingEcology
At the exact same time as the Beatles released “Norwegian
Wood,” in December 1965, Robert Esdaile launched a
targeted and comprehensive criticism of designers’ lack of
concern for environmental problems on the pages of the
Norwegian architectural magazine Arkitektnytt. His acutely
titled essay, “The Environmental Crisis,” was published
in five installments from 1965 to 1967, setting the tone
for the budding debate on ecology and design in Norway.
Canadian-born Esdaile trained at McGill University,
Montreal, and at the University of Cambridge. After
marrying Elin Høst, a Norwegian, he moved to Norway in
1948, where he first worked as a planner before setting up
an architectural practice in 1955. Collaborating with key
figures such as Odd Brochmann, Dag Rognlien (editor of
Arkitektnytt from 1966), and Christian Norberg-Schulz,
Esdaile remained a steadfast modernist, a member of the
International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM)
to the very end, and a key promoter of Le Corbusier’s
ideas in Norway. From 1964, initially filling in for Sverre
Fehn, he taught at the Oslo School of Architecture,2
until
being appointed professor at the Norwegian Institute of
Technology in 1971.3
Esdaile was as radical a citizen as he
was a design theorist and educator. After he attended the
Robert Esdaile, apartment building at Bjørnekollen, Oslo (1956). Photo: Bjørn Winsnæs (1959).
Courtesy of the National Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design. CC-BY-NC.
2. Letter to Robert Esdaile
from secretary Armand
Halvorsen of the National
College of Applied Art
and Craft/Oslo School of
Architecture, dated January
18, 1964. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23 Serie
D Korrespondanse, NTNU
University Library, Trondheim.
3. Arne Gunnarsjaa,
Arkitekturleksikon (Oslo:
Abstrakt forlag, 1999), 224.
120 Design Struggles
seventh congress of the International Union of Architects
(IUA) in Havana, Cuba, in 1963, where both Fidel Castro
and Ernesto “Che” Guevara addressed the delegates, he
took to signing private letters “Venceremos” and “Hasta
la victoria siempre.” Deeply inspired by his experience in
Cuba, he would later cite from Fidel’s and Che’s IUA talks
in his teaching as a way of convincing his students that
they and their profession could make a difference in – and
to – the world.4
With a background in planning, in his essay on the
environmental crisis Esdaile homed in on perhaps the most
obvious target: the car and its implications for the organization
of transport systems and settlement patterns. Esdaile
argued that this quintessential symbol of modern society
and personal liberation had become a massive paradox,
paralyzed by its own success: “The dream of ‘living freely’
murders the freedom of living.”5
The car was both a societal
and an environmental problem:
the privately owned automobile … creates chaos,
pollution, an alarming number of deathes [sic]
and wounded. It distorts civic life and will in time
congest and pollute the most exquisite countryside,
our last reserve of inspiration and human dignity.
This is not a fantasy, but a pure statement of facts.6
He did not oppose the car as such, but believed that its
production, distribution, and use had to be brought under
strict regulation to keep it from suffocating our airways and
highways alike.
The car was just a convenient example, though,
and Esdaile cast the entirety of human history as “a career
which gradually freed him [Man] from the inhibiting
discipline of nature. The acquired knowledge of this last
millennia [sic] of his existence on earth is like a bulldozer
out of control. All the ‘signs’ and warnings which nature
gently confronts us with are being trodden upon in a
gigantic stampede. This planless stampede leaves behind it
an environmental crisis.”7
Stopping the bulldozer required
coordinated planning and a holistic, or at least systemic,
approach to design. Over-specialization resulted in tunnel
vision and the pulverization of responsibility, he argued.
4. Robert Esdailes arkiv,
NAM1995:23 Serie
D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design; Nils
Werenskiold, “Den radikale
arkitekt-professor,” Aktuell,
no. 8 (February 20, 1971), 28,
29; anon., “Miljøvokteren,”
Dagbladet, May 30, 1970, p. 5.
5. Robert Esdaile, “Our
Environmental Crisis II,”
Arkitektnytt no. 3 (1966), 42.
6. Esdaile, 42.
7. Robert Esdaile, “Our
Environmental Crisis,”
Arkitektnytt no. 20 (1965),
376.
121Kjetil Fallan
However, it is in Esdaile’s prescription for curing this illness
that his intervention becomes particularly perceptive.
Addressing the environmental crisis, he suggests, requires
that design engages with “ecological issues, because this
exact and beautifully broad science coordinates mans [sic]
behavior with the laws and habits of nature.”8
Esdaile’s
trumpeting of ecology in a mainstream design context
stands out, three years before the arrival of Buckminster
Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth9
and the
first Whole Earth Catalog – publications that were key in
popularizing ecology and promoting the idea of “whole
systems” thinking in design discourse.10
Although ecological
thought has a long history, there is broad consensus that as
a distinct discipline ecology emerged in the early twentieth
century. It was only in the 1960s, however, that it gained
public prominence, as a consequence of increased concern
for the state of the environment.11
Esdaile was an architect, not a biologist, and
there is nothing in his article that indicates any profound
scientific knowledge of ecology. His interest in the concept
seems to have been as an inspiration or tool with which
designers could learn to think more holistically about their
interventions in the world and the environmental impact of
their practice. The time was ripe, he claimed, for the human
species to put its creative capacities to better use:
The success of people to adapt themselves has been
at times astonishing and admirable, at other times
they have wasted the land depleting both their
energies and reserves. Never before has the power
of man to waste and ravage been so decisive. Final
destruction lies in his own hands.12
This latter observation on the prospect of human-originated
obliteration is clearly colored by the Cold War
climate in the wake of the Cuba crisis. In an environmentalist
context, Esdaile’s comment recalls a tagline later made
instantly famous: “We have met the enemy and he is us,”
which cartoonist Walt Kelly originally applied to a poster
he created for the first Earth Day in 1970.13
It also preempts
a very similar remark made by György Kepes in the context
of the vastly ambitious “Universitas Project” at New York’s
8. Esdaile, 376.
9. Richard Buckminster Fuller,
Operating Manual for Spaceship
Earth (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1968).
10. Andrew G. Kirk, The Whole
Earth Catalog and American
Environmentalism (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas,
2007), 56–64; Peder Anker,
From Bauhaus to Ecohouse:
A History of Ecological Design
(Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana
State University Press, 2010),
68–82.
11. Robert P. McIntosh, The
Background of Ecology: Concept
and Theory (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press,
1985).
12. Robert Esdaile, “Our
Environmental Crisis III,”
Arkitektnytt no. 14 (1966),
254.
13. Finis Dunaway, Seeing
Green: The Use and Abuse of
American Environmental Images
(Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2015), 66.
122 Design Struggles
Museum of Modern Art in 1972: “At this historical junction,
the real beasts are man-created: we face ourselves as
the enemy.”14
Kepes, an artist, designer, and scholar teaching
at MIT, then went on to say that this new awareness of our
precarious situation had made us begin
to see that our extended body, our social and
man-transformed environment must develop its
own self-regulating mechanisms to eliminate the
poisons injected into it and to recycle useful matter.
Environmental homeostasis on a global scale is
now necessary to survival.15
Like Kepes, Esdaile saw in ecology a conceptual model for
thinking across scales and along relations. Only by adopting
an ecological mindset, he argued, could designers help to
reinstate the equilibrium they have contributed to upset
by, in the words of Victor Papanek, “creating whole new
species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape,
and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air
we breathe.”16
To pull back from the brink of Armageddon
and set spaceship earth on a more sustainable course,
Esdaile reasoned, we needed an entirely new approach to
planning the human environment. Recalling its publication
date – 1966 – his suggested strategy remains an early articulation
of key principles of ecological design:
What resources can we now call upon to face this
new situation? Certainly not new weapons: certainly
not a new invention. No, a conscientious ability
to see with microscopic clarity and macroscopic
breadth the interwoven and complex unity of man
and nature. The science is called ECOLOGY. If we
could apply it in its generous wholeness which is its
supreme justification, we might have time to regain
a balance. But the application of Ecology demands
a changed state of mind: an I-Thou relationship
instead of an I-it relationship. This has nothing to
do with the sentimentality of a “back to nature”
attitude which is the prestige of the well-to-do
urban dweller. It embodies rather humility and
collaboration, expressing the balance in biological
14. György Kepes, “Art and
Ecological Consciousness,”
in The Universitas Project:
Solutions for a PostTechnological
Society, ed.
Emilio Ambaszed (New York,
NY: MoMA Publications,
2006), 152.
15. Kepes, 154.
16. Victor Papanek, Design for
the Real World: Human Ecology
and Social Change (New York,
NY: Pantheon Books, 1971), xi.
123
sciences. Most important to the architect, it gives
a very clear picture of environmental factors and
their interplay.17
ExhibitingDoomandGloom
“The Environmental Crisis” was just the beginning of
Esdaile’s passionate and long-lasting efforts in the name of
ecological design, most of which he would channel through
his teaching and campaigns for educational reform. An
alternative way of communicating the message, though,
was the medium of exhibitions. In 1968, marking the
occasion of his employer, the Oslo School of Architecture,
moving out of the premises of its parent institution, the
National College of Applied Art and Craft, he organized an
exhibition about urban environmental problems. According
to him, this event was the “precursor” to another exhibition
shown the following year in Oslo “on [his] initiative” called
And after us…18
This claim is slightly misleading, though,
as the latter exhibition was a local adaptation of a concept
developed by architecture students at Chalmers Institute
of Technology in Gothenburg and shown at a dozen
venues in Sweden since May 1968, generating considerable
media coverage and public attention. A delegation from
the Oslo School of Architecture, led by Esdaile, along
with representatives from the Norwegian Society for
the Conservation of Nature and the United Nations
Association of Norway, met with one of the original curators,
Ivar Fernemo from Chalmers, and others in December
1968 to plan a Norwegian version of the show.19
The basic
message of the exhibition – that the future of the world and
humanity alike was threatened by our maltreatment of the
environment – was carried over from the Swedish edition,
including excerpts from research by leading Swedish
environmentalist-scholars underpinning this view, such as
biologist-cum-geographer Georg Borgström and biochemist
Hans Palmstierna. As agreed, though, Esdaile added to this
Norwegian material, sampling from, for example, zoology
professor Rolf Vik’s popular writings on the environmental
crisis, a Rachel Carson-derived exposé of DDT by Ragnhild
Sundby (professor of zoology at the Norwegian College of
17. Esdaile, “Our
Environmental Crisis III,” 254.
18. “Bilag til søknad fra
Prof. Robert Esdaile,” dated
August 21, 1978. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
19. “Protokoll fört vid
förberedande samträde
mellan interesserade i
utställningsprojektet ÄN SEN
DÅ… den 18 dec. 1968,” Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gc Manuskripter til
foredrag, artikler og andre
tekster, Nasjonalmuseet for
kunst, arkitektur og design.
Kjetil Fallan
Agriculture and, from 1972, president of the Norwegian
Society for the Conservation of Nature), historian Tore
Linné Eriksen’s work on developmental aid, and Esdaile’s
own crusade against the private car.20
Through the medium of a pop-up exhibition
structure designed for ease of assembly and transport
accompanied by a comparatively comprehensive catalog,
Esdaile and his architecture students – assisted by design
students from the National College of Applied Art and
Craft – then organized and presented this broad swath
of scholarship using visually striking infographics and
photomontages accompanied by succinct texts. Neatly indicating
the pertinent yet precarious nature of the project’s
main message, the catalog’s cover featured an illustration
composed of an ultrasound image of a six-week-old fetus
rendered in red superimposed on a black-and-white image
of Earth seen from space. Rendering an unborn child in
this context makes it an extreme example of the trope of
“children as emotional emblems of the future” identified by
Finis Dunaway as key in the visual culture of environmentalism:
“Within the context of popular environmentalism,
children’s bodies provide a way to visualize the largely
invisible threats of radiation, toxicity, and other environmental
dangers.”21
A forceful symbol of Mother Earth,
this illustration, paired with the distressing title, And after
us…, efficiently communicated the sense of fragility and
20. Anon., ed., og etter
oss… (Oslo: Norges
naturvernforbund, 1970).
21. Dunaway, Seeing Green, 3.
Spread from the exhibition catalog And after us… illustrating “today” (left) and “tomorrow?” (right).
Front cover of the catalog for the exhibition And after us… featuring an image of a fetus superimposed
on a “blue marble” photo of the earth.
126 Design Struggles
urgency which the exhibition sought to instill in the public.
And the message hit home. Not only was the exhibition met
with great public interest, drawing eighty thousand visitors
in Oslo alone before moving on to Bergen, Trondheim,
and other venues22
– it even pushed back at the academic
community, becoming “important in triggering a call to
action amongst the environmentally concerned at the
University [of Oslo],” especially for the emerging ecophi-
losophers.23
Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, a research fellow and
former student of professor Arne Næss and prime mover in
the formation of the Ecophilosophy Group,
was greatly impressed by the exhibition, and
invited the architects to join hands with students of
ecology, philosophers, and technical climbers from
the Alpine Club, to create a Co-working Group for
the Protection of Nature and the Environment at
the University.24
Their subsequent correspondence reveals that Esdaile
was clearly flattered and motivated by Kvaløy’s gesture,
as it meant bringing design discourse to the epicenter of
environmental scholarship and activism.25
DecentralizingDesign
In June 1966, Esdaile wrote to Håkon Stenstadvold,
rector of the National College of Applied Art and Craft,
regarding an exhibition planned for the institution’s 150th
anniversary two years later. At this point, at least until its
relocation in 1968, the Oslo School of Architecture had
a rather symbiotic relationship with the National College
of Applied Art and Craft, from which it had spawned in
1962.26
Exactly what his role was in these plans is unclear,
but Esdaile’s involvement is testimony to his commitment
to the reform of design in general, across professional
specializations. Turning again to ecology, he advised that
the exhibition should showcase
a new attitude towards the idea of dwelling,
showing that it is possible to make a fundamental
22. Anon., “Og etter oss…,”
Norsk natur, no. 5 (June 1969),
34–39.
23. Peder Anker, “Science as a
Vacation: A History of Ecology
in Norway,” History of Science
45, no. 4 (2007), 463.
24. Anker, 463.
25. Letters from Robert Esdaile
to Sigmund Kvåløy, dated July
8, 1969, August 31, 1969,
and October 1, 1969, Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gc Manuskripter til
foredrag, artikler og andre
tekster, Nasjonalmuseet for
kunst, arkitektur og design.
26. Gunnarsjaa,
Arkitekturleksikon, 729.
127
improvement in the urban structure, in the dwelling
structure, or an integration of both which would
combine to solve a large number of pressing
ecological problems.27
Furthermore – and perhaps somewhat surprisingly coming
from a Canadian immigrant – he lamented the fact that our
material culture was being transformed through “a steadily
increasing number of mass-production articles of foreign
design and origin,” making it all the more “imperative
that Norway makes an effort to express the material and
regional quality of its products – especially those products
which form our own environment.”28
It is not unlikely that
Esdaile’s interest in design’s local context and environment
was informed by his collaborator and colleague Christian
Norberg-Schulz, who at this time had just begun developing
his theories of place in architecture which later would
become massively influential.29
Crucially, though, Esdaile’s
interest in locally distinct design solutions was paired
with his appreciation of the global perspective fostered
by ecological thinking in response to the environmental
crisis. This juxtaposition of scales inspired by ecology and
regionalism effectively preempted the idiom “think globally,
act locally,” which some years later would become the
slogan of the Friends of the Earth (established in 1969) and
emblematic of the environmentalist movement in general.
This insistence on acting locally for the greater
(global) good would become a staple of Esdaile’s teaching
practice and his steadfast drive for educational reform.
Not long after he started teaching at the Oslo School of
Architecture he wrote a letter to the head of the school,
professor Knut Knutsen, complaining that “two scientific
subjects that concern relations between humans and nature,
ecology and ethnology … are utterly neglected in the
school’s curriculum.”30
Knutsen was known for his renewal
of Norwegian timber architecture and his gentle treatment
of the natural surroundings, especially following his cabin
in Portør (1949), so Esdaile presumably expected his superior
to take favorably to his ideas for teaching ecological
design. Writing again to the school’s management in April
1968, he presented a “draft program for socio-ecological
studies.” The purpose was to increase the students’
27. Robert Esdaile, letter to
Håkon Stenstadvold, June
24, 1966. Statsarkivet i Oslo,
A-10583, 02/Da-0170.
28. Esdaile, letter to Håkon
Stenstadvold.
29. Most famously articulated
in Christian Norberg-Schulz,
Genius Loci: Towards a
Phenomenology of Architecture
(New York, NY: Rizzoli, 1980).
30. Letter from Robert Esdaile
to professor Knut Knutsen.
Undated [1966–1969]. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gc Manuskripter til
foredrag, artikler og andre
tekster, Nasjonalmuseet for
kunst, arkitektur og design.
Kjetil Fallan
128 Design Struggles
knowledge about the most pressing of “current problems,”
emphasizing the consequences of the environmental crisis
for the design professions.31
“Failing to address these
questions,” he claimed, “is tantamount to denying our
descendants the right to live, or to accept the aggravation
of the misery of the world.”32
His proposed reading list
included works by scholars represented in And after us…,
such as Borgström, Palmstierna, and Vik.33
For Esdaile, however, introducing courses on
ecology and related topics would only go some way
towards the required educational reform. Dismissing what
he dubbed “the 98% adoption of a technical scientific
approach to Ecology for training of architects,” Esdaile
argued that “for architects the important thing is to
UNDERSTAND, see, smell, feel, and diagnose in this
way, respecting with an almost religious awe the beautiful
synthesis of all nature from the cosmic to microcosmic.”34
Therefore, merely revamping the curriculum would not do –
the very structure of architectural education had to change,
from large, centrally located academic institutions to small,
geographically dispersed nodes of practical learning. This
type of distributed learning was required because “students
need more intimate working knowledge of environmental
issues, and it is questionable if this can be achieved from
an institutional mileau [sic].”35
The first public presentation
of his ideas for a decentralized architectural education
appeared on the pages of Arkitektnytt in 1969. What he
suggested was that a central institution – a “mother-school”
– could serve as a central hub for, say, sixty “outposts”
located in small communities around the country. Each
outpost would consist of a dozen or so students conducting
locally specific, real-life projects supervised by one or a
few teachers. The local context was crucial to the new type
of design and planning expertise he envisaged: “Here the
group is confronted with the people, the resources, the
traditions, and the future prospects of the place. Here is
the architect’s laboratory.”36
Moving to a new outpost every
semester, interspersed by brief visits to the mother-school
for theoretical teaching components as well as project
presentations and appraisals, the students would thus in the
course of the program receive solid, yet varied hands-on
and in situ experience with planning and design work. “An
31. Robert Esdaile, memo
titled “Til S.A.O.,” dated
April 1968. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
32. Robert Esdaile, memo
titled “Planlegging ved
SAO,” undated. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Ga Manuskripter
til forelesninger og annet
undervisningsmateriell,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
33. Ibid.
34. Letter from Robert
Esdaile to “Tore” [no last
name provided], October
24, 1969. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
35. Robert Esdaile,
“Perspektives [sic] of
architectural education,”
manuscript dated 1974. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gb Materiale knyttet
til undervisning ved NTH,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
36. Robert Esdaile,
“Desentralisering av
arkitektutdannelsen,”
Arkitektnytt no. 9 (1969),
unpaged.
129
outpost,” he explained, “is perhaps best likened to F. L.
Wright’s Taliesin, but the purpose is entirely different. We
are to serve society’s needs under its organic development,
not a subjective formalism.”37
Writing to an acquaintance he hoped could help
set up an outpost in Alta, a small town in the far north of
Norway, the geographer Øystein Dalland (who would later
become professor of environmental planning at Telemark
University College), Esdaile was confident that “in a very
near future we could count on creating a miniature school
of architecture in Alta, a school complete with an ecologist,
sociologist, and an architect-planner.”38
Not surprisingly,
Esdaile’s radical proposal proved hard to realize. Hoping
to secure broader academic support for the idea, he wrote
to Kvaløy suggesting they could discuss the matter in the
Co-working Group for the Protection of Nature and the
Environment at the University of Oslo.39
Even though the
latter had little to offer beyond moral support, he kept in
touch – also with their “godfather,” Arne Næss.40
His own
institution’s management was not entirely dismissive of the
decentralization idea, agreeing to establish a committee
tasked with exploring its feasibility.41
Except for a couple
of ad hoc trial projects more akin to summer excursions,
though, the scheme would remain at the proposal stage.
That did not deter Esdaile from persistently promoting
the idea, even long after he moved to Trondheim in 1971
to take up his professorship at the Norwegian Institute
of Technology. His new institution does not seem to have
been any more enthusiastic about it than was the Oslo
school, but as late as 1975 he described the scheme as “a
new educational response to our environmental crisis.”42
He also sought to publish the idea internationally, writing
to Architectural Design magazine that “we can’t count on
initial Govm’t support nor on students who primarily want
qualifying semesters. We have to count on the appeal that
the idea has for the few and the appeal of Norways [sic]
dramatic landscape.”43
Norway’s dramatic landscape clearly held significant
appeal to Esdaile himself. For the cover of the first
issue of 1976, Byggekunst chose an image of Esdaile’s own
DIY cabin – a repurposed coastal artillery emplacement
on top of a cliff above the Jøssingfjord in south-western
37. Robert Esdaile,
“Undervisningens dilemma,”
Arkitektnytt no. 19 (1969),
unpaged.
38. Letter from Robert Esdaile
to Øystein Dalland, dated
August 22, 1969. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
39. Letter from Robert Esdaile
to Sigmund Kvåløy, dated
July 8, 1969. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23 Serie
Gc Manuskripter til foredrag,
artikler og andre tekster,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
40. Letter from Arne Næss
to Robert Esdaile, undated
(1975). Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
41. Minutes from meeting
on the decentralization of
architecture, dated March
5, 1970. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie D Korrespondanse,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
42. Robert Esdaile, “The
decentralized school of
architecture: A new response
to our environmental crisis,”
unpublished manuscript,
January 9, 1975. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gc Manuskripter til
foredrag, artikler og andre
tekster, Nasjonalmuseet for
kunst, arkitektur og design.
43. Letter from Robert Esdaile
to Architectural Design (att:
Editorial Assistant Barbara
Goldstein), dated February
10, 1975. Robert Esdailes
arkiv, NAM1995:23 Serie
Gb Materiale knyttet til
undervisning ved NTH,
Nasjonalmuseet for kunst,
arkitektur og design.
Kjetil Fallan
130 Design Struggles
Norway. The simple, un-intrusive structure consisted
of a low wooden roof raised on top of the artillery
emplacement, which was built in 1942 as part of Hitler’s
Atlantic Wall. Reclaiming a remote, spectacular site from
the destructive forces of military technology and, by the
smallest means possible, turning it into a sanctuary for the
appreciation of the natural landscape, the project constitutes
a highly symbolic gesture – a three-dimensional manifesto
of ecological design. The location of the site made
Front cover of Byggekunst (no. 1, 1976) featuring Robert Esdaile’s DIY cabin on top of a cliff above the
Jøssingfjord in south-western Norway. Courtesy of Arkitektur N.
131
the project doubly symbolic, as the Jøssingfjord featured
prominently in environmentalist discourse at the time, due
to the heavy pollution of the fjord caused by waste from
the Titania company’s ilmenite mines nearby (the world’s
biggest bearing of that mineral). As a concerned citizen
Esdaile contributed to this attention by complaining to
the newly established (1974) Norwegian Pollution Control
Authority, accusing it of being too lenient towards the
company’s practices.44
The power of the double symbolism
inherent to his cabin project was naturally not lost on
Esdaile, who presented it to the readers of Byggekunst
explicitly as a commentary on the combined ills of society
and an intervention in the name of more sustainable modes
of interaction with nature.45
MoralMaterials
What’s in a chair? The rise of the environmentalist
movement and the emerging ecological sensitivity of
design professionals discussed above coincided with a
marked shift in furniture design: the sudden abandoning
of tropical woods in favor of indigenous ones. The
Norwegian furniture industry had enjoyed considerable
commercial success and critical acclaim from the mid-1950s
as part of the wider international interest in Scandinavian
design. Paradoxically, though, this furniture, which to
international audiences apparently expressed something
inherently Scandinavian, was predominantly made from
woods nowhere to be found in the region, but which had to
be imported from far corners of the globe – most notably
teak, but also mahogany, rosewood, etc. Always fearing a
fad, design critics grew skeptical of the fashion for tropical
woods in the 1960s, but their arguments soon moved
beyond the usual warnings against herd mentality and lack
of originality. The tropical materials which had contributed
to the international fame of Scandinavian design were
now cast as alien, false, and extravagant; as inappropriate
for Norwegian furniture. Alf Midtbust, director of the
National Federation of Furniture Manufacturers, put it
succinctly: “The Danes conquered the world with teak from
Siam… We Norwegians have the opportunity to conquer
44. Letter from Robert Esdaile
to the Norwegian Pollution
Control Authority, dated
February, 17, 1979. Robert
Esdailes arkiv, NAM1995:23
Serie Gc Manuskripter til
foredrag, artikler og andre
tekster, Nasjonalmuseet for
kunst, arkitektur og design.
45. Robert Esdaile, “‘Jansholet’:
Hytte ved Jøssingfjord,”
Byggekunst 58, no. 1 (1976),
6–7.
Kjetil Fallan
132 Design Struggles
the world using pine and birch.”46
In stark contrast to
Denmark, Norway (and Sweden) has vast forests ripe with
resources readily available to local designers and manufacturers,
and utilizing these rather than tropical imports
became a moral imperative.47
The design magazine Bonytt led the way, propagating
quite intensely for the use of indigenous woods,
especially birch and pine, in the name of functional appropriateness,
national traits, ethics, and resource management
alike. Leisure cabins became a stepping stone in this
campaign, on the assumption that these spaces required
furniture which was simpler, sturdier, and cheaper than in
permanent homes – and pine, especially, was considered
optimally suited for such designs.48
In 1965, a spate of
design competitions, organized by the National Federation
of Furniture Manufacturers, the Norwegian Home Craft
Association, and the Furniture Industry’s Trade Council,
resulted in a wide range of innovative furniture, much of
which was made from pine. The same year, the Norwegian
Furniture Fair in Stavanger dedicated an exhibition to new
designs in pine, which generated considerable attention.
Pine, of course, has many applications other than
furniture, and was the basis for many small businesses and
industries in towns and rural districts across the country.
Designing furniture in pine to be manufactured by such
enterprises rather than by traditional cabinetmakers or
furniture factories had a double effect: firstly, it allowed
these enterprises to move into the production of finished
goods with a higher profit margin, thus potentially generating
economic growth in local communities threatened
by depopulation. Secondly, designing for simple, rational
production without relying on specialized craft expertise,
and using an inexpensive and abundant material, resulted
in affordable products. Such design projects could thus
also contribute to social sustainability, a feature considered
inseparable from design for environmental sustainability
by key thinkers from William Morris to Arne Næss, and
intricately intertwined also in other, contemporary efforts to
revitalize local communities by design.49
The work of designer Edvin Helseth becomes
particularly interesting in this context. Throughout the
1960s he developed several furniture systems – all in
46. Alf Midtbust, “Frem for
furua,” Bonytt no. 5 (1965),
126.
47. Kjetil Fallan, “‘The
“Designer”: The 11th
Plague’: Design Discourse
from Consumer Activism to
Environmentalism in 1960s
Norway,” Design Issues 27, no. 4
(2011), 34.
48. See, e.g., Alf Midtbust,
“Frem for furua,” Bonytt, no.
5 (1965), 126–27; Marianne
Gullowsen, “Efterlyses…,”
Bonytt no. 5 (1965), 139–40;
Arne Remlov, “Det lyktes – så
langt,” Bonytt no. 7/8 (1965),
221–24; Arne Remlov, “Vår
mann i Stavanger,” Bonytt no. 9
(1965), 252–58; Arne Remlov,
“Fra det ene til det annet...,”
Bonytt no. 9 (1966), 242.
49. Malin K. Graesse, “The
Weaving World of Deep
Ecology and Textile Design:
Locating Principles of
Sustainability at Austvatn
Craft Central” (master’s thesis,
University of Oslo, 2017).
pine – for small, local industries based in the heavily
forested regions around Norway’s largest lake, Mjøsa. In
1961 Helseth designed the modular storage system 5-15
for Systemtre A/L in Hamar (the town was also home
to Helseth’s design practice) and redesigned the flexible
bookshelf system BBB for the rake manufacturer Eidsvoll
Rivefabrikk. None of these companies had any experience
with furniture production but extensive knowledge about
wood processing, so the choice of material, the unconventional
know-how, and the constraints and affordances
of the production process, were key factors in the design
process. Helseth brought these experiences to the table
when he designed the furniture series Trybo, launched in
1965. Manufactured by the local sawmill Stange Bruk,
the various pieces in the series were designed using pine in
standard dimensions, assembled in only right angles and
straight lines, requiring as little finishing as possible.
Designer Edvin Helseth (left) and the General Manager of Trysil Municipal Forest Administration, Jostein
Bjørnersen (right), demonstrates a Trybo chair for the Minister of Industry, Sverre Walter Rostoft, on the
occasion of receiving the Norwegian Design Award in 1967. Courtesy of DOGA – Design and Architecture
Norway. CC-BY-NC.
134 Design Struggles
The joints were pine plugs rather than nails or screws.50
To be assembled by the customer (or retailer), the furniture
was shipped flat-packed for more economical (and thus
more environmentally-friendly) transport – a concept later
made world-famous by IKEA. Trybo was favorably received
in design circles, and it was precisely its social design ambitions
and attention to resource use which was highlighted.
The jury of the Norwegian Design Award, which it received
in 1967, hailed it as “an exceptionally good example of
product development based on strictly limited raw materials
and production facilities.”51
As mentioned above, whole system thinking was
essential in formulating theories of ecological design.
Helseth’s design practice can be seen as a real-world manifestation
of this mode of thinking. His systemic approach
to design made apparent – and thus consequential – the
many material, social, economic, and ecological connections
extending from his pine furniture. Fully in line with
his systemic design philosophy, the Trybo furniture was
originally developed as an integral part of a new, modular,
prefabricated leisure cabin model, the Trysil cabin, commissioned
by Trysil Municipal Forest District. When the
project was presented in the British Council of Industrial
Design’s Design magazine, it was again as an example of
environmentally sensible social design:
[the cabin] was designed in response to two needs.
The first was to create more work in an area of
depopulation. The other was to produce a holiday
house which was easy to erect and would fit into the
landscape, as part of a plan to develop tourism in
the region.52
The cabin itself, naturally also made from pine, was
designed by Helseth’s colleague in the architectural office
Arkitim, Hans Østerhaug. Trybo was thus part of the new,
morally acceptable material culture of leisure, but also a
paradigmatic example both of the systemic thinking and
the attention to regional specificities integral to the development
of ecological design.
50. Harriet Clayhills, “Hytter
med system,” Bonytt no. 9
(1965), 240–43; Liv Schjødt,
“Vi trenger hyttemøbler også!,”
Bonytt no. 1 (1966), 12–13.
51. Alf Bøe, Den norske
Designpris, de syv første år/The
Norwegian Design Award, its
first seven years (Oslo: Norsk
Designcentrum, 1969), 52.
52. Alf Bøe, “Designed for
Leisure Living,” Design no. 248
(1969), 32–34.
135
Conclusion
Just as the Beatles established “Norwegian Wood” as an
instant enigma in popular culture, from the mid-1960s
Norwegian wood took on a new meaning in design culture
– both literally and figuratively. The growing awareness
of and attention to the precarious state of the natural
environment and the harm inflicted on it by industry and
consumer society made designers and architects recalibrate
their professional ethics. Inspired by models and ideals
culled from the life sciences, and particularly from ecology,
radically-minded and eloquent educators and practitioners
called for new approaches to design, to manufacturing, and
to consumption – ultimately, to life itself. Conceptually
and ideologically, Norwegian wood represented a reaction
both to the refined but elitist niceties of 1950s Scandinavian
design and to the rampant consumerism symbolized
by jukeboxes and Juicy Fruit. Simultaneously a model
ecosystem, a material and economic resource, and a setting
for a natural and healthy leisure life, Norwegian wood is a
shorthand for the broad scope of professional and societal
changes deemed necessary to design a more sustainable
future.
“Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?”
Kjetil Fallan