Supervisor:
Mari Hvattum
In 1849, the architect Hans Ditlev Franciscus Linstow (1787–1851) published an article where he looked back on his design for The Royal Palace in Oslo, originally designed twenty-six years earlier. Presenting a genealogy stretching back to the eighteenth century, he explained the classical design of the palace with his own cultural horizon and historical situatedness. His way of thinking, he wrote, had been shaped by his knowledge of classical literature and Winckelmann. The composition of the palace, the architect went on to say, belonged to the era of Goethe and Schiller. An architect, writing about his designs, explaining their form with reference to a literary world, is the starting point for this study of the relationship between texts and buildings in the life and career of a Norwegian nineteenth-century architect.
Finding himself in a country with limited resources, Linstow experienced life as an architect as a constant battle to bring his projects to fruition. The battle was usually fought with the pen. Through numerous newspaper articles, letters and a handful of publications, Linstow developed and shared his thoughts not only on specific building projects, but also on architecture in general as well as on the nature of art and history. An intellectual with a European horizon, the pen as much as the column became his tool when contributing to shaping the Norwegian nation. Linstow's Library studies Linstow's own texts as well as his building projects, reading them as products of a European discourse received primarily through an engagement with books.
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