Ingrid Dobloug Roede - Harald Hals and Potemkin’s Village: The Geopolitical Dimensions of Architectural Mediation in Norway circa 1935–1950 [Working title]
Harald Hals (1876–1959) was a pivotal figure in Norwegian architectural history, widely recognized for his social housing projects, as president of the Norwegian Association of Architects and as Oslo’s influential city planning officer. He was also, however, an internationally oriented cosmopolite with interests and connections that far transcended national borders.
This project will engage with the discursive exchange of imagery and ideas between Norway and the USSR around the years 1935–1950, with Harald Hals as a focal character. The aim is to trace the multiplicity of impulses that conditioned architectural discourse in Norway at the time, and more specifically to explore the centrality of geopolitical narratives and social networks in the mediation of modern architecture. Architectural mediation will be examined through a variety of print media and exhibitions in order to uncover how Norwegian architects understood, formulated, and propagandized their tasks when subject to foreign discourse, impulses and interaction.
From the 1920s onwards, the USSR was frequented by European “tourists of the revolution.” These visits, often highly choreographed, fostered a vast volume of travelogues – a history which Harald Hals’ public broadcasts inscribe themselves into. Harald Hals visited the USSR in different personal and official capacities twice before, and once after, WW2. Following each trip, he published extensive reports and treatises on Soviet architecture, planning, and daily life for a general Norwegian readership. Harald Hals’ ties to the USSR reached its formalized zenith when he spearheaded the Norwegian-Soviet friendship society Norsk-Sovjetrussisk Samband between 1945–1948. His final visit to the USSR spanned three weeks in 1947, as part of a cultural delegation invited by the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS). Architecture was notably one of several instruments of exchange utilized by the para-diplomatic organization VOKS for cultural expansionism and agitprop.
While material and political circumstances differed in Norway and the USSR, both states dealt with similar architectural problems during the period: prefabrication, rational planning, modernization, and – especially by the late 1940s – reconstruction in the wake of WW2, at the onset of nuclear anxiety and Cold War. Due to its geographical contiguity with the former USSR, and its strong political and cultural ties to the US, Norway represents a curious frontier, and by extension: a prism through which to examine the architectural ideals each bloc promoted. The dissertation’s working hypothesis is that the transnational diffusion of architecture facilitated productive dialogue and worked as an innocuous vector of exchange in a time marked by geopolitical turmoil and fluctuating cultural distance.