ABSTRACT
For Sverre Fehn, light, dark, fire and water have always been the physical dualities out of which the presence of place has been constituted and from this comes the political sense of 'civitas' that is brought into being with the feudal hearth, the public well, the Stoa, the Market Hall, the Butter-cross, the Cathedral and the Moot Hall. Fehn was the storyteller. There was narrative in all that he did and those stories were not a conceit. Their purpose was to reacquaint us with all that we have forgotten, and in that process, ground us in our own existence in the particularity of place. Fehn was born in the small provincial mining town of Kongsberg, eastern Norway, in 1924. He completed his studies in Architecture at what is now known as the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in 1949, joined the Progressive Architects Group Oslo, Norway in 1950, and made his seminal trip to Morocco in 1952–1953.
