Norway's Art Nouveau city — rebuilt after fire, set on islands in the fjords
Ålesund is Norway's most distinctive small city — a compact Art Nouveau townscape built almost entirely between 1904 and 1907 after the original wooden city burned to the ground in a single winter night. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who spent his Norwegian summer holidays in the nearby fjords, sent a German relief ship with building materials, and German architects rebuilt Ålesund in the Jugendstil style fashionable in central Europe at the time. The result is a Norwegian coastal city that looks like nowhere else in Scandinavia: turrets, bay windows, ornamental facades, and pastel colours on a cluster…
The fire of January 23, 1904, destroyed Ålesund in under four hours — 850 buildings, 10,000 people made homeless, remarkably only one death. The rapid Art Nouveau rebuilding was funded partly by Kaiser Wilhelm and partly by Norwegian government relief. The uniformity of the architectural style (all rebuilt in less than three years) makes Ålesund one of Europe's most coherent Art Nouveau ensembles — comparable to Nancy in France and Riga in Latvia, but with the added drama of the Norwegian fjord setting. The Aksla viewpoint above the city (418 steps from the town centre) gives the panorama ove…