Articles

Only weeks after the fire, the government proposed compulsory masonry construction in Norwegian towns. Ålesund’s city council set the local boundary on 28 April 1904. Broad streets at Aspegata in the west and Gjerdegata in the east were intended to separate the new masonry district from wooden buildings.

Kristiania, Bergen and Trondheim had required masonry in central areas since 1845. Ålesund’s catastrophe helped turn that local practice into a national shift. Fire safety now shaped both the material of individual buildings and the plan of the city itself.

Jens Zetlitz Monrad Kielland was born in Stavanger in 1866 and studied at the Royal Technical University in Berlin. He worked in several German architectural offices, including that of Hans Grisebach from 1892 to 1894. Grisebach was influenced by historicism, where earlier styles, craft traditions and modern industrial products were brought together in buildings whose façades also carried symbolic meaning.

Kielland moved to Bergen in 1894 and later established his own practice. His early work drew on the Swiss chalet style, the Dragon Style and historicism, but around the turn of the century he began searching for a more locally rooted architecture. This can be seen in his villas and in his work at Bryggen, where new commercial buildings were carefully adapted to the scale and character of the historic timber settlement. Local tradition, spatial planning, light and colour became increasingly important alongside the new ideas of Jugendstil.

After the town fire of 1904, Kielland became an early participant in the rebuilding of Ålesund. He maintained a branch office in the town from 1904 to 1907 and was responsible for twenty buildings, in addition to work on several churches in the surrounding district.

Storgata 23 is protected as a characteristic example of a combined residential and commercial building. It also displays several features found across Kielland’s Ålesund work: rendered masonry rather than extensive use of natural stone, pointed gables, raised wall sections above the cornice, and carefully composed doors and windows. The street façades carry vegetal ornament, while elevations facing the sea are generally more restrained. Similar elements can also be traced in his buildings in Bergen.

In 1912, Kielland was appointed to a newly established professorship in architecture at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. Six years later he opened a new practice in Kristiania, while also publishing books on art history and architecture. He died in 1926.

The rebuilding became a national material project. Slate came from Alta, marble from Eide on Nordmøre, granite from Østfold, brick from Trøndelag and Eastern Norway, and timber from across the country. The demand gave work to quarries, brickworks, transporters and skilled stonecutters.

Material choice was practical and symbolic. Rough stone façades resisted weather and needed little maintenance, while Norwegian rock also evoked the national bedrock during the years around independence from Sweden. Geology became part of the city’s identity.

Architect Sverre Knudsen won the church competition with a design chosen from 63 proposals. The building combines Romanesque forms, Baroque references and Jugendstil material treatment. Its asymmetrical tower became a landmark in the rebuilt town.

About 2,000 square metres of façade were covered with rough marble from Visnes in Eide. White, yellow, red and dark layers make the walls change character with weather and light. Finely cut white marble frames openings and entrances, while several Norwegian granites appear in stairs and other details.