The course is integrated with Studio Positions’ ongoing BIP/Erasmus+ teaching collaboration, “Rural areas facing climate change”. This Blended Intensive Program aims to exchange views on the remote territories facing the challenges of climate change and the realities of new rurality and sustainability. The program focuses on the mutation of the built types and unbuilt spaces with regard to upheavals in uses and practices, climate change or new materials and construction techniques, cultural or political revolutions.

The semester task is to develop a prototype for housing in an existing residential area prone to flooding and landslides in the southeast of Norway. The site will be further specified. We aim to challenge the outermost limit of the human habitat in the face of the forces of nature where the architecture marks the interface and thus acts as the mediator between humans and the climatic and geographical environment. How do we design an architecture (space, material, structure) that not only protects us from the forces of nature but considers them as a quality?

Through architectural projects, Studio Positions continues to critically discuss and investigate how architecture reflects on, contributes to, and provides for dwelling in our contemporary diverse society.

Contemporary societal discussions, directions in art, philosophy, sociology and ecology, and architectural discourses provide the framework for architectural projects that are developed individually with emphasis on the three fundamental aspects of architecture – structure, material, and space.

Projects will investigate architectural (structural, material, spatial) responses to identified climatic circumstances, in a Nordic context. Projects will discuss the social and cultural challenges of climate change that mark our time, and reflect on how these challenges influence our relationship to architectural space and how we interact with it.