LAND: Design, change and management of Sami resicences in Tysfjord

The project´s objects of study are Sami dwellings in the Tysfjord area in Nordland, and the period chosen is from the 1960´s and up to today. For comparison, a small study will be carried out in a village in the eastern Sami area Notozero, by the Lotta R iver on the Kola peninsula in Northern Russia, where the inhabitants were centralized and relocated around 1960. A dwelling can be interpreted as both product and process. As a product, it has tangible character, and can be seen as communicating with the landscape. It also has abstract connotations, associated with memory, symbolic value, emotional ties and identification. The dwelling as process involves those who participate in the process and the conditions they have for participation. The landscape of private homes (dwellings) is formed through an interplay between the house builder and the framework defined by public management policies and practices. The architecture thus mirrors the society´s principal and partly invisible conditions and perequisit es, as well as the buildes´s possibilities and choises. National aprogrammes for social and economic development in Sami areas in the post-war period included in Tysfjord a programme for relocation of inhabitants and erecting homes in central areas. This affected the built landscape in a substantial way, and also demanded new social and economic strategies. The project´s theoretical perspective is broad-spectered, including theories on vernacular architecture, on attachment to places (topophilia) and on the meanings and effects of materiality. The analyses will focus on - the dwelling as product; in the landscapes and on the parcel - the dwelling and work - the dwelling and the social environment - the dwelling as process - the dwelling as symbol