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Dag Nilsen Area of study: Architecture and
Mathematics |
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Dag
Nilsen is an architect who graduated from the then Norwegian
Institute of Technology, Trondheim in 1974 (now the Norwegian
University of Technology and Science). Since 1994 he has been
an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture of that
university, teaching Architectural History in general, and Building
Conservation including Documentation and Analysis of Buildings
in Master courses.
His research activities and professional practice is mainly concerned with Norwegian vernacular architecture, and conservation issues relating to individual buildings as well as the urban/built environment level. It was while working with a conservation area in a small Norwegian town in the 1980s that he became aware of a significant occurrence of measure ratios in plans, sections, decorative and even structural details, indicating they had been determined by the use of simple mathematics. Contrary to the then-prevalent notion in architectural education and practice, it seemed that provincial, non-architect builders of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, unaware of the modern notion of architectural form as an expression of its author's feeling and intuitive sense, had recourse to a fairly elaborate set of "rules of play" in making design decisions.
In further research, he has mainly been concerned with the
particular problems of studying timber buildings in this respect,
but he has also published two case studies of the possible use
of mathematically-based design in Norwegian mediaeval stone-built
churches. See Dag Nilsen, "The Squaring of the Circle in
two Early Norwegian Cathedrals?", Nexus Network Journal,
vol. 3, no. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 27-42, http://www.nexusjournal.com/Nilsen.html.
Contact:
Dag Nilsen
Inst. for arkitekturhistorie
Norwegian University of Technology and Science (NTNU)
Alfred Getzv. 3
7491 Trondheim NORWAY
E-mail: dag.nilsen@ark.ntnu.no
Copyright ©2006 Kim Williams