The fishing village of Andenes on the north end of Andøya in Nordland county, early post-war. Photo: Fjellanger Widerøe AS.
The adaptations to industry along the coast have also created a very distinctive architectural expression. Architectural historians have noted that from Lindesnes to Finnmark there is "a long coastal built environment that defines a very special cultural geographic region in Europe". They found more similarities along the coast than across it: "greater affinity between the coasts of Hordaland and Helgeland than between Solund and Sogndal".
In an historical perspective this concerns a built environment more strongly influenced by traditional building practice, adaptation to landscape and climate, and the functional needs of industry in the rural districts of the inner fjords than in the open agricultural landscapes of Eastern Norway and Trøndelag. The houses on the fisher-farmers’ land by the edge of the sea were usually small and low (only one storey).
Around 1900 there were still elements of joined houses, a type of house with roots in the prehistoric longhouses. Until being replaced in the latter half of the 19th century, clustered farmyards were especially typical for Western Norway and Northern Norway. Not least, farms had dedicated buildings for sea-related tasks. Every farm that was not too far from the sea had a boathouse. These could be gathered in rows at suitable places, a boathouse commons where also the hillside farms or the ones further up the valleys had lots.
Those who were successful fishermen would usually also have a little wharfside shed, called a sjå from Nordmøre and beyond. In the herring districts the net frames or net dryers stood closely spaced; they were not buildings as such but roofed wooden constructions connected with twentieth-century seine fishing. In the skrei-cod districts the drying racks set their stamp on the cultural landscape, both the older type of horizontal rack and the higher vertical ones.
