‘Lecture by JOHANNES NORLANDER’

Johannes Norlander founded his firm in Stockholm in 2004, immediately after completing his studies in architecture and graphic design. Five years ago he expanded the practice when he opened an office in Gothenburg. During the early years he designed principally small-scale projects such as furniture and interiors, on which he worked with Asplund and Hay in particular. Inspired by the brutalism of Juliaan Lampens and the craftsmanship of Swiss and Scandinavian projects, his designs are essentially simple yet highly detailed. He himself describes his work as ‘no-nonsense’ architecture: architecture in which intuition and a search for the essence of an object are the point of departure.  

Norlander is experiencing growing success in Sweden, his country of origin, where he is now working on increasingly major projects, such as ‘Annex’, an extension to the Gothenburg University building. In 2016 he won Sweden’s most prestigious architecture prize, the Kasper Salin Prize, for his ‘HSB Studio 1’ apartment building. 

He is now working on his first major project outside Sweden, HÅVN, for the urban development of Antwerp’s Nieuw Zuid district. In this case, the potential and the qualities of the concrete cast on site are the point of departure for a simple concept and architecture of clear lines. 

More recently, Johannes Norlander won a competition that resulted in a second commission in Belgium, the housing project in Neerland (Wilrijk) that he will be building in cooperation with the Antwerp practice, Hama. So it is high time we invited him for a lecture! 

On 6 March, A+ and BOZAR will be pleased to invite Johannes Norlander to the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels where the architect will speak about his professional journey with particular reference to the history of 20th century architecture in Sweden. Finally, Norlander will reveal where he believes ‘things went wrong’ and why Sweden lost its way at the very moment when the whole world was beginning to show an interest in Scandinavian design.