How Norway was built: the history of Norwegian construction from stave churches to Rogfast

Two techniques carried the country. Laft, horizontal logs notched at the corners, built farms, storehouses and whole town quarters. The stave technique, corner posts on a sill frame with vertical planks between them, built the churches. Up to 2,000 stave churches once stood in Norway, most of them raised between 1150 and 1350; 28 are still standing, and Urnes, from the first half of the 12th century, is on the UNESCO list.

The colour came later and had nothing to do with taste at first. Red iron-oxide paint, cooked with rye flour and water, was the cheap coat, made industrially in Falun from 1764; white lead paint was expensive, so a farm often had a white front and red outbuildings. That is why so much of the countryside is still red and so many town fronts are white.

Bergen shows what wooden towns cost. The Hanseatic Kontor at Bryggen ran from about 1350 to 1754, burned in 1702 and again in 1955, and was rebuilt each time on the same medieval plots. It became Norway's first UNESCO World Heritage site in 1979.

What that timber tradition means for carpenters working here today

On the night of 23 January 1904 a storm drove a fire through Ålesund. About 850 houses burned and more than 10,000 people lost their homes. The town was rebuilt in brick and stone in the Art Nouveau style of the day, and by 1907 306 masonry buildings were finished. Fire rules after that pushed masonry into every Norwegian town centre.

The Bergen railway was decided in 1894 and opened on 27 November 1909: 470 km with 200 tunnels, built by up to 2,000 rallare, the navvies who moved from one construction camp to the next. It cost 52.5 million kroner, about a whole state budget of the time. Norway had learned to drill, blast and organise labour at scale, and it has been doing it ever since.

A dedicated office, Finnmarkskontoret, with more than 800 staff, ran the reconstruction: standard house types, standard sizes, and materials shipped north. The gjenreisningshus, the reconstruction house, is still the most common building in many northern towns, and it is the housing stock that is being renovated up there today.

In the south the state built differently: with money. Husbanken, the state housing bank, was founded on 1 March 1946 and went on to finance more than half of all dwellings built in Norway in the post-war period. Even after 2005 it still financed 15 to 20 per cent of new homes each year.

The housing co-operatives supplied the other half of the machine. OBOS was founded in 1929, and from 1951 it built Lambertseter, Norway's first drabantby, most of it finished by 1958. Prefabricated concrete, standard flats, a school and a shopping centre: the model was copied around every Norwegian city for the next thirty years.

Troll A is the extreme case: 472 metres from the seabed to the deck, 369 metres of it concrete, roughly 1,200 thousand tonnes, towed into position over a week in May 1995. It remains the tallest structure ever moved by people.

The money mattered as much as the concrete. Oil revenue is what let a country of five million fund the roads, tunnels, hospitals and schools that came next, and it is the reason the state can still commit to twelve-year infrastructure plans while the private housing market goes up and down.

Offshore and oil-rig work in Norway today

The Lærdal tunnel is 24.5 kilometres long, with three lit caverns along the way to keep drivers awake. It exists because a fjord crossing had to work in winter, which is the reason for most Norwegian tunnels: geography, not prestige.

The programme has not stopped. E39 Rogfast, 33.4 billion kroner, about 27 kilometres long and 400 metres below the sea, is due to open in 2033 as the world's longest and deepest undersea road tunnel. Tunnel work is the most weather-proof job on this list: rock does not care that it is February.

What Norway is building through 2036, and who it is short of

It matters beyond the record. Cross-laminated timber turned wood back into a structural material for buildings above four storeys, which is why carpenters on Norwegian sites now raise apartment blocks, schools and hospital wings in timber rather than only houses. The country that built stave churches spent a century in concrete and came back to wood with a crane.

The arithmetic is simple. A house built in 1965 is sixty years old: the roof, the windows, the wiring and the bathroom have all reached the end of their lives at roughly the same time, and there are hundreds of thousands of them. Add the energy rules and the work is not optional.

Renovation in Norway is measured against TEK17, the building regulation in force since 2017. It sets what has to be met when you rebuild, not only when you build new, which is why a bathroom refit turns into membrane work, ventilation and documentation.

At the heritage end the same logic produced the stave-church programme: between 2001 and 2015 all 28 remaining stave churches were repaired for about 130 million kroner. A country that keeps its 800-year-old buildings standing is a country that keeps craftsmen busy.

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Norwegian construction employed 251,000 people in 2022, up from 167,500 in 2006, and the share born in Norway has fallen from 88 per cent in 2008 to 77 per cent in 2022 (Fafo). Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian and German crews are not a footnote to this history; for the last two decades they are part of it.

Why Norway is short of builders, and what it is building next