Restore: Weather is an experimental preservation studio in a series of courses exploring how architecture can be redefined through the reuse, transformation and preservation of what is already built. This semester will be dedicated to weather in all its forms and meanings, and its implications for the construction, care and understanding of architecture. Weather constantly dominates news headlines across the world, reporting on floods, rain storms, drought, landslides, wildfires, blizzards and tornados, giving proof of accelerating human-induced global warming. Arguably, architecture is all about weather, providing shelter against the violent forces of nature, spurring creative acts of construction and maintenance. Weather is constructing building codes and regulations, turning architecture into a complex set of material composites and maintenance-schedules. Weather is both science and poetry, chronicled through time as surveys and statistics, but also in the form of painting, literature, sculpture, film and photography. Weather is at the center of preservation, activating core questions of the discipline, relating to patina, authenticity, originality, authorship and more. The studio asks for speculative explorations of weather as a broad cultural phenomenon, as well as specific architectural propositions on how to deal with weather in the reuse, transformation and preservation of architecture.

The studio is part of the research project “Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the era of Circular Economy”, run by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen