Knut Hamsun Centre is a concept based on the natural and cultural surroundings, Hamsun’s personality and his literary heritage. Holl’s concept is “the building as a Body" - a battlefield for invisible powers, a Hamsun figure as an architectural structure”.

Knut Hamsun Centre is a body, a human being, a state of mind.

Tall but crooked, distinctive but ambiguous, contrasting and thought provoking. The contact with the building arouses new impulsive thoughts and feelings the same way as an encounter with a stranger. Curiosity and distancing at the beginning. Do I like it or not?

The same way a human eye, a two-way communication system, expresses the inner state of the human being and perceives the external world at the same time, the master architect has presented his building for inward and outward view, to let nature and the surroundings highlight the interior of the building.

The mighty nature of Nordland seeps in through the building's openings, the same way it once affected the author's intellectual landscape.

The building has its closed rooms and dark corners, too. These rooms will offer you a powerful digital presentation of Hamsun’s life and works. This was a life distinguished by the burden of original guilt, poverty, hard work, longing and restlessness. Success and fall, pride and loneliness. A mind of strong will and openness, shaped by emotional relational experiences from the time before he had the words and the writing force to soothe, explain and steer his world of emotions.