Abstract

Since the 1970s, major public buildings—museums, cultural centres and parliamentary assemblies—have been erected in Sápmi. Widespread interest in them has provided a welcome corrective to the marginalisation of Sámi architecture in dominant accounts of Nordic architectural history and theory.

Yet analyses of Sámi public buildings remain stubbornly anchored to an ostensible paradox: Designed to give contemporary form to an ancient nomadic Indigenous culture, their central attributes of publicness and permanence are foreign to the architectural tradition they seek to represent. Insistence on the perceived ‘contradictory contemporaneity’ of Sámi architecture has constrained its critical reception and interpretation to comparative analyses with Nordic new-build projects.

This talk discusses the emergence, persistence and consequences of interpretations focussed on the perceived paradoxicality of Sámi public buildings, and suggests that means to challenge them might be gleaned, in part, from the historiography of modern architecture.