Segment of the row of warehouses in Sandviken in Bergen, ca. 1932. Photo: Norwegian Fisheries Museum.
A comparison of the buildings in the larger coastal towns around 1900 shows that the prominence of the more expensive and pretentious brick buildings was much greater in towns such as Fredrikstad, Halden, Drammen, and Skien than in fishery-related towns such as Stavanger, Haugesund, Ålesund, and Kristiansund, and certainly all the towns of northern Norway. Timber buildings dominated the west and north.
The difference in monumental architecture becomes even greater if we compare with Swedish and Danish towns of the same size. We have seen that the vast majority of Norwegian coastal towns based much of their business economy on export and/or shipping. But the eastern Norwegian towns mentioned, along with Oslo, Trondheim, and Kristiansand, additionally functioned as central places for spacious agricultural and forestry districts, for they were usually at the estuaries of large waterways systems.
Industry in towns that expanded in the eighteenth and ninteenth centuries in connection with such “deep” hinterlands likely had a more large-scale structure than that found in towns depending on fishing, export of fish, and/or shipping with sailing ships. Other things being equal, the sea, being a public area, promoted a more open and fragmented business structure and thus a greater distribution of economic power. This relationship is reflected in the design of buildings. It also fits in with the clear difference in the size of farms in Western Norway/Northern Norway and in Eastern Norway/Trøndelag.
There was a big gap between the enclosed square farmsteads with a clock tower and a manor-like main house around Lake Mjøsa and Oslofjord – or the considerable Trøndelag farmhouses – and the farm dwellings in Western Norway, not to mention those of the fisherman-farmer in Northern Norway.
Picture: Segment of the row of warehouses in Sandviken in Bergen, ca. 1932: here were storehouses for stockfish, klipfish, codliver oil, cod roe, salt, flour, feed concentrate, and so on. The steamships are in lay-up. Most of Bergen’s receiving operations for herring and sprats lay outside city’s boundaries, especially on Askøy: herring packing and curing plants, sardine factories, herring-oil refineries etc. Photo: Norwegian Fisheries Museum.
