Lilla Georgine Hansen

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Lilla Georgine Hansen decided to become a sculptor when she was 17 years old. At art school, however, she took an ornamentation class taught by Herman Major Schirmer and her eyes were opened to architecture. Her interest in nature had already been sparked by the Art Nouveau movement, but, as the architect Gro Lauvland points out, Hansen’s relation to nature seems rooted in a different way: it is not nature that is the basis for concrete ‘images’ – this is not what characterises her works. Rather, it is a site-adaptation that indicates an openness to nature’s variations and changeability. Lauvland further describes Hansen’s works as characterised by a ‘carefully tuned interplay between the place, the body of the building, and its details’. Hansen came to be known for designing innovative and practical floor plans that, along with including gardens and playgrounds, introduced everything from ski storerooms to the first corner window in Norwegian architectural history. In a much-quoted letter to her colleague Harriet Flaatten, dated 13 November 1956, Hansen speaks of her experiences in the otherwise male-dominated field of architecture: ‘I was asked how I managed the loud-voiced buildering constructors. The answer was, I whisper.’

Hansen designed the telegraph building that was erected in 1914 to house Sørvågen Radio, but thus far it has been difficult to find extensive information about her project in Northern Norway. Maybe this is not so strange; people who knew her well said she apparently set fire to her archive before she died. Hansen’s contribution to Lofoten International Art Festival is therefore primarily the building in Sørvågen. It has housed a number of visits and activities by artists in advance of the festival, through collaboration with Museum Nord and the foundation Stiftelsen Gamle Å.

Lilla Georgine Hansen (1872–1962) is considered the first Norwegian woman to establish her own architectural practice. After studying sculpture with Hans Lerche, she enrolled in Den kongeligeTegneskolen (the Royal Drafting School) and studied under the architect Herman Schirmer, graduating in 1894. She then moved to Brussels and worked for two years as an apprentice to Victor Horta, one of Europe’s most prominent architects at the time. It is uncertain exactly when she started her own practice, but after apprenticeships with the architects Halfdan Berle in Kristiania (Oslo) and Martin Nyrop in Copenhagen, she was established as an architect in 1908. She designed a number of private homes, one of which was for the textile artist Frida Hansen, at Tingstuveien 23 in today’s Oslo. The breakthrough came in 1912 when she won a competition for the design of a housing complex at Heftye terrasse; in addition to the building, it included front gardens and play areas. She later designed Tolga Hospital, The Tuberculous Sanitorium (1932), accommodations for students and nurses at the rheumatic hospital run by the Norwegian Women’s Public Health Association (1935) and the rheumatic hospital for Oslo Public Health Association (1938–39).