ABSTRACT
The joint view taken by art historians and restorers from Russia and Norway of the tasks of studying and preserving monuments of architecture and urban planning that is presented in this book is shaped by several factors. Both countries laid strong foundations for the subsequent centuries-long development of wooden architecture, and the review of joint work in the sphere of preserving our wooden heritage represents a sort of symbolic coming together of two great timber-building traditions. The intensive development of contacts between Russia and Norway in the tenth to fourteenth centuries was later checked by the conclusion of the Union of Calmar in 1397 effectively meant that Norway lost its independence. In the second half of the twentieth century, the welfare state model that formed the basis of the Norwegian economic and social system gave rise in both countries to the phenomenon of social housing. The fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991 reopened the border between Russia and Norway.
