2025
1,380 / 5,000
The barns of Norway is a magnificent book that, with a total of 564 pages and over 1000 photos, is the largest work ever written about this part of Norwegian cultural history. The book tells the story of the Norwegian barn, the most important outbuilding in Norwegian agriculture, an icon in the Norwegian landscape.
Photographer Oddleiv Apneseth and journalist Eva Røyrane have traveled the country to document the very diverse Norwegian barn landscape. Using the farmer's outbuilding as a starting point, they tell agricultural history and cultural history, but also a story about Norway today.
The barn has been a landmark in the Norwegian cultural landscape for several hundred years and is a signal building that shows the central position that the farmer and agriculture generally have in this country. The author and photographer have visited both unique and representative barns around the country. They present the diversity from well-kept to dilapidated barns and from traditional to architecturally designed barns. They show modern specialized farm buildings and old agricultural buildings that have been given new content through new forms of business activity. The book is thus a reference work that shows the many different geographical variants, the architectural qualities and the cultural heritage value of this building.
The book collects the history of an important part of our common cultural heritage, before it can no longer be documented.
