ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three different ways of enacting and understanding the surface. The first one, which treats the architectural as surface as derivative of function, always already an after-effect, is often associated with architectural modernism. The modernist call for transparency stressed the correspondence between the outer appearance and the structural logic as a virtue of a constructional honesty and aesthetic clarity. Secondly, in culture historical studies of vernacular architecture, the surfaces of buildings were often seen as the recent, often entropic layers that rendered illegible the basic forms of the architectural grammar. The third mode of grasping the surface is the author's own attempt to reflect on the restrictions imposed on the field work in Olderfjord at a site that was, regardless of its battered appearance, the property of a museum, and hence calling for distance and caution.
