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Norway's leading architect, he received his profession's highest honour

Sverre Fehn, who has died aged 84, was Norway's foremost architect of the postwar years. One of his best works is the Nordic pavilion in Venice, built for the 1962 Biennale. As they gather together in Venice every two years, it is fascinating to witness the architectural intelligentsia, jabbering about the latest concoction on display, fall silent as they enter this masterful, deceptively simple space.

A luminous shelter, formed of improbably long, razor-thin white concrete beams, it has a structural grid which allows a group of trees to grow within the building; its roof is designed to shield the interior from the sun's direct rays. Like all Fehn's work, it attempts to incarnate a primordial communion between man and his environment. In 1997 Fehn was justly awarded his profession's highest honour, the Pritzker prize. This did not trigger the avalanche of international commissions that might have been expected, but he nevertheless remained intensely busy in his native country right up to the end of his life.

Fehn was born in Kongsberg, Norway, and spent his life "trying to run away from the Nordic tradition", while admitting that "it is difficult to run away from yourself". He studied at the Oslo School of Architecture with the modernist architect Arne Korsmo, qualifying in 1949. Korsmo helped him obtain a scholarship to study and work with the French master of lightweight construction, Jean Prouvé, in 1953-54.

Fehn was deeply marked by Prouvé's ingenuity in resolving complex problems of construction detail, but, while in Paris, he was also strongly influenced by Le Corbusier. He succeeded in finding a path between the opposing dogmas of hi-tech and brutalism which these two figures came to represent, distilling instead a poetics of construction from Prouvé and a concern for the primitive from Le Corbusier. Around this time, he began lifelong affiliations with his contemporaries Jørn Utzon and Giancarlo de Carlo, who, like Fehn, were suspicious of the increasingly canonic character of the modern movement.

A trip to Morocco in the early 1950s also provided inspiration for Fehn. Studying and living in adobe vernacular houses, he was impressed by their beauty: earth was piled up into simple structures, which, inside, were flexible and responsive both to the environment (regulating heat and light) and the requirements of daily life (an empty, earthy room could become a convivial eating place with the addition of a low table, or a bedroom with a mat unrolled on the floor). He noted that these buildings appeared "clear and logical ... just as nature is herself".

The Moroccan environment, with its heat, dryness and light, was the inverse of the damp, misty, chilly Norway, where Fehn would work for the rest of his life, and where he would attempt to create similarly responsive architecture for very different conditions. He started his own practice in 1954 with two foreign commissions: the Venice pavilion and the Norwegian pavilion for the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels. The latter exhibited the tectonic wizardry of Prouvé: columns were made of intersecting blades of Perspex; glue-laminated wooden beams sailed over a 28m span; and the entire building was held together with just 48 bolts (it was dismantled after the exhibition).

The rest of Fehn's built work (slightly more than 30 buildings) would be in Scandinavia, and relatively modest in scale. A series of country villas developed a sophisticated language of brick, concrete and wood construction. Villa Busk (completed in 1990), in Bamble, southern Norway, is a low, lengthy form overlooking a fjord and topped by a tower. Its outer wall, in site-cast concrete, is founded directly on to the rock of the site (something risky and difficult to realise), thereby revealing the line drawn by a retreating glacier millennia ago. The Eco House in Norrköping, Sweden (1991) was a tiny courtyard dwelling (a prototype for a much larger development of holiday houses) made from a wooden frame, erected in two days, with straw bales sealed in clay plaster as the principal wall material - as economical and elegant as his Moroccan inspirations.

Fehn also designed several museums of note. These include the Norwegian Glacier Museum (1991) in Fjaerland, western Norway, the recently completed Norwegian National Museum of Architecture in Oslo (2008), and the Hedmark Ethnographic Museum in Hamar, north of Oslo (built between 1969 and 1979).

In the Hedmark museum - perhaps his masterpiece - he created a rigorous, rhythmic wooden roof structure stepping along the broken walls of a medieval archbishop's palace, which shelters a collection of artefacts ranging from a prehistoric ski to vases and cooking utensils. The public route through the building floats above the ground on a concrete bridge which eventually exits the building through a suspended glass wall to sail over archaeological remains in the complex's courtyard.

Of his unbuilt work, perhaps the greatest regret should be for his project for the Royal theatre in Copenhagen, a rare excursion into urban territory. A 1:1 scale prototype of the foyer's elegant columns sweeping into a wing-shaped roof was installed on site for public consideration, but the project went no further.

Fehn remained a quiet, modest figure, genteel, generous, ruggedly handsome and utterly dedicated to his work. He wrote little, but taught at the Oslo School of Architecture for 24 years (1971-95). The inaugural exhibition at his Norwegian National Museum of Architecture, which opened last August, was a retrospective of his career.

In 1952 he married Ingrid Loberg Pettersen, who died in 2005; he is survived by a son and four grandchildren.

• Sverre Fehn, architect, born 14 August 1924; died 23 February 2009

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David Cockayne
Newark, Nottinghamshire

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