This is the first post in the Winter Olympics & Their Environments series edited by Jesse Ritner and M. Blake Butler.
The Olympic Games are a major infrastructural undertaking for the hosts. This was certainly the case for the small Norwegian town Lillehammer, which had less than 25,000 inhabitants when it hosted the Winter Olympics in 1994. Lillehammer, which is located two to three hours north of Oslo by car, had many qualities that made it attractive as an Olympic location—slopes, reliable snowfall, and beautiful nature. Yet the sheer number of people who needed accommodation was a challenge. Government reports estimated that the Olympic Games would attract 100,000 visitors and 25,000 accredited athletes and media representatives, many of whom would require lodging.1 Locals were concerned by the size and extent of necessary infrastructure, especially after seeing the massive installations in Sarajevo, which hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. A series of Olympic villages for athletes and media had been built in and around Sarajevo, the third largest city in Yugoslavia and twenty times the size of Lillehammer. Rather than launch a mega-project to transform the city, as Sarajevo had done, the Lillehammer Olympics advocated a decentralized village atmosphere with a high emphasis on post-event repurposing. The Lillehammer Olympic Winter Games became known as the first “Green Games”—but how green were they really?
A combination of permanent and temporary housing areas with detailed and specific plans for post-Olympic use was the core of the Green Games strategy. Furthermore, by decentralizing the infrastructure from the start, local planners aimed to avoid overinvestment in hotels and massive facilities that would have limited uses after the Olympics. The media village in Hafjell, built as accommodation for the 6,000 journalists and media personnel covering the 1994 Olympics, demonstrates what this looked like in practice. Designed by Eriksen & Marlow Arkitekter, the Hafjelltoppen media village cabins were in architectural and cultural dialogue with established building traditions in Norway, particularly drawing on the wooden farmhouses of the region. The result was a cluster of traditional-looking dark timber log buildings with sod roofs, each with road access and parking in front, scattered around a landscape lightly forested with tall pine trees. It is a strikingly incongruous blend of a romantic nature idyll (popularized through the Cabin Porn website and book) and modern suburban infrastructure.2 These were designed from the outset to be converted into, and sold as, high-standard privately owned cabins after the Games, near the large downhill ski resorts that were built or expanded for the Olympics.
While modelled after traditional Norwegian mountain cabins, the media village was an intervention in Norwegian cabin traditions. The cabin culture and traditions that Hafjelltoppen referenced are often presented as an age-old cultural bedrock of Norway. Yet, as a mass phenomenon, the Norwegian cabin is actually tied to the post-World War Two growth in leisure time and affluence. Private cabin ownership exploded in Norway after the 1960s, establishing a cultural ideal for experiencing nature through a privately owned second home. The afterlives of the Olympic cabin villages had a significant impact on Norwegian cabin culture and on its relationship to nature. The physical environment of the Hafjell and Lillehammer region was soon full of many more cabin villages based on the same model. At the same time, the idea of what a cabin should be and what its relationship to its surroundings should look like changed dramatically.
The village model functioned as a subdivision in the mountains, developed to provide electricity, water, sewage, telecommunications, and road access. This shift towards full infrastructure, high-energy cabins had a significant impact on Norwegian cabin culture, which tended to depend on off-grid solutions for electricity, water, and sewage. In a 1994 interview, the architect Per-Johan Eriksen said that the Hafjell cabins had been designed and built for hotel standards, where the buyers should “feel that they live in a winter village with contact with nature and all privacy requirements preserved.” The architects designed these new cabins to visually match traditional cabins. But they were also built to a “high technical standard,” with electric heating, heated bathroom floors, running water (“of course”), sewage, telephone, TV—“everything that belongs to a house of modern standard.”3 Each plot also had permission to build a garage. Local newspapers called them “luxury cabins.” The big shift that the Olympics planners spearheaded was the development of second-home villages, where consumers looking to buy a cabin gained access to high technological standards and all the conveniences of modern homes through the planned development of what were at their root suburban areas.
Cabins are infrastructural interfaces between people’s lives and energy infrastructures in “high energy societies,” as historian David Nye calls the Nordic countries.4 The Hafjell cabins led the way in promoting high-energy cabin cultures. After the Olympics, the cabins were converted and sold to private buyers. The media village cabins did not have kitchens, so these were added. As a result, energy use in Hafjell grew dramatically. For example, the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature pointed out that one particularly conspicuous cabin that featured a heated driveway, an outdoor bath, and heaters on the outside deck used ten times as much electricity as an average Norwegian house and that even the average Hafjell cabin used far more electricity than other nearby electrified cabins.5
The design choices of the Hafjelltoppen media village extended the Olympic legacy far beyond 1994.The architectural firm Marlow Arkitekter later stated, “the standard at Hafjelltoppen is now often considered the minimum standard in new cabin developments around the country.”6 Hafjelltoppen demonstrated that there was a market for high standard cabins in dense developments. The post-Olympic cabin established a model for particular ways of experiencing winter landscapes by promoting forms of energy use that one today must recognize as playing a significant role in changing the natures and climates that the cabins were built to experience. The cabins were a way of using winter environments that centered thermal comfort and temporal and spatial convenience. However, the massive infrastructural developments cabins required radically modified landscapes, visibly and invisibly. This established a model where cabins were not just for leisure activities, but also for work. When cabins had the full technological infrastructure, which in the early 2000s also increasingly included data and broadband access, people could use them as a home office. People’s use of their cabins changed from fewer, longer stays to more frequent, shorter stays. As a result, the cabins were always switched on and always using electricity.
The media village cabins have been called one of the most successful results of the 1994 Olympics.7 While one can debate what “success” means, these cabins have certainly had a significant impact. The high-energy legacy of the Hafjelltoppen media village is a contrast to the “Green Games” image cultivated by the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. Riding the wave of Our Common Future in 1987 and the Rio conference in 1992, the Lillehammer Games helped push the IOC to formalize sustainability as the third pillar of Olympism, alongside sport and culture. However, we can also consider the 1994 Olympics a classic 1990s sustainability case: symbolically powerful, institutionally important, with relatively low local landscape damage—yet blind to the long-term, system-level energy and climate implications. The use of cabin architecture for Olympic housing transformed a national nature imaginary into high-energy leisure infrastructure. This is far from a green legacy.
[1] St.prp. nr. 61 (1989-90), “De 17. olympiske vinterleker på Lillehammer 1994. Arenalokaliseringer, m.v.”, p. 5.
[2] Finn Arne Jørgensen, “Why Look at Cabin Porn?”, Public Culture 27(3), 2015, p. 557–578.
[3] “Hafjelltoppen Hyttegrend,” Byggenytt 39(1), 1994, p. 12-13.
[4] David Nye (1998) Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. MIT Press.
[5] “Hyttebyen i Hafjell – vårt nye kraftsluk.” Natur & miljø Bulletin 1, 2000, p. 4-5.
[6] “Mediabyen”. Marlow Arkitekter, https://marlowarkitekter.no/portfolio-item/mediabyen-ol-1994/
[7] Stated by tourism and second home researcher Thor Flognfeldt jr. in “Fra halve helger til halve uker,” Hytteliv 7, 2001, p. 75.
Finn Arne Jørgensen
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