Sverre Fehn has taught at Cooper Union in New York and has many professional links with American architecture. To hear Fehn lecture about Manhattan and life among the skyscrapers, as I did once in the early 1980s before visiting the United States with a group of architecture students, can be a real joy. I believe that all architects of genius share this attitude, relating to their surroundings and to the life of the people in a way that is at once humble and fearless. In the world as they experience it, the Beauty and the Beast are always neighbors. Pure idylls do not exist.
Existence has two faces.
To create something beautiful and useful, and to enrich people's physical environment, is always the goal of an architect's work. Sverre Fehn has long since found his permanent place in world architecture. Jan Carlsen is a Norwegian architect now working as a freelance writer in Oslo. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the New Jersey Institute of Technology at Newark.