VENICE.- The National Museum has commissioned the Oslo-based firm Kastler Skjeseth Architects to create Norway’s exhibition for the Nordic Pavilion at the 20th International Architecture Exhibition in Venice next year. Architects Amandine Kastler and Erlend Skjeseth, partners in the practice, have now begun developing the project.

Kastler Skjeseth Architects has long been interested in how ideas of the traditional and familiar continue to resurface in Norwegian architecture. Forms, motifs, and elements from the past are repeatedly reinterpreted, often appearing in new roles and unexpected contexts. Their installation in the pavilion will build on this theme, combining contemporary and historical components.

The world’s leading arena for architecture

The Venice Architecture Biennale is the most influential international platform for architectural discourse. In 2025, it welcomed 298,000 visitors, with young people and students accounting for 28 percent of the audience—making it a vital meeting point for emerging practitioners, established professionals, and architecture enthusiasts worldwide.

“The Architecture Biennale is a crucial arena for exploring new understandings of architecture within a broader societal context. As Norway’s national museum, we have a responsibility to highlight practices that investigate what architecture means—as cultural heritage, as spatial experience, and as part of everyday life,” says Nora Ceciliedatter Nerdrum, Director of Collections at the National Museum.

The Nordic Pavilion is jointly owned by Norway, Sweden, and Finland. Responsibility for the exhibition rotates, and the National Museum leads the project every sixth year.

Responding to the biennale’s theme

The 2027 biennale will be curated by Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, founders of Amateur Architecture Studio in Hangzhou. Their exhibition will focus on local context, craftsmanship, and sustainability. In dialogue with this framework, Kastler Skjeseth Architects is developing an installation that examines architectural traditions through spatial and historical studies.

“Our aim is to contribute an investigative and artistic response to the curators’ theme—an exhibition that challenges ideas of the traditional, the familiar, and the everyday in Norwegian architecture,” says Joakim Skajaa, curator at the National Museum.

The exhibition will explore how local building techniques, craft traditions, and global impulses intersect, including the impact of prefabrication. It will highlight how layers of cultural history and aesthetics continue to shape contemporary construction, and present examples of reuse, adaptation, and transformation.

Hybrids that challenge architectural categories

Over the past decade, Kastler Skjeseth Architects has focused on transforming older buildings in rural Norway—contexts where historical motifs frequently reappear in new constellations.

“We believe future architecture will increasingly combine fragments of the past with the technologies of tomorrow, creating ambiguous hybrids that challenge established distinctions,” the architects say.

Their recent renovation and extension of Nettas Hus, a 1920s institution building in Dypvåg in Tvedestrand, exemplifies this approach. New functions were integrated into the terrain to preserve the character of the original structure, and a new pavilion draws inspiration from 1920s bathhouses and regional building traditions. The project seeks to contribute a contemporary addition that builds on local principles without directly replicating history.

“In unsettled times, people often return to what feels familiar, and we are seeing renewed interest in traditional and local forms of building,” the architects add.
Their accumulated experience now forms the foundation for next year’s biennale project.

“Sverre Fehn’s pavilion is itself an interpretation of Nordic light, and it provides an ideal architectural framework for this investigation,” they conclude.