Oslo is a city of waters, situated within a territory of abundant water resources and histories, with reservoirs and rivers constituting vital arteries between Marka forest and the fjord seas. Green and blue - still, one may wonder, where are its architectures and landscapes of water?

Consciously, the question of the whereabouts of water architectures points to a discrepancy of current building practices and an ecologically and socially sound landscape-oriented formation of the city, or in other words, as formulated by Vittorio Gregotti in 1966, between architecture and the logic of the territory . The aim of the studio is to envision the future of the urban as a negotiated articulation of this incongruity. It will discuss the role of architecture and landscape within the relationship between the scales and frames of the ordinary and everyday, and the geographical and social territory, aiming for proposals to be part of the bigger picture to intensify meaning and quality of the very territory. This is an urgent need while the effects of climate change are becoming more present in everyday life as flooding . Here the architects and landscape architects have the capacity to inform the projects by ecological systems, social contexts, scientific information and mediate and develop a better interaction in the relation between the surroundings and the built up environment.

Sp(c)lash!
Oslo’s urban development is shaped by diverging forces, a part of them understanding the form of territory simply as a backdrop. A strand of this story is that Oslo’s waters have been pushed to the invisible realm of sunken infrastructure, at its time for good reasons, them being a carrier of pollutants during industrialization and later, with tap water, becoming a granted but black-boxed service of modern serviced living. Although today the municipality strives for the opening of its streams and rivulets, the underlying hydrological system is more likely to surface in unwanted accidents. Accelerated by climate change with its redistribution of water as heavy rains, an aging mixed-water sewage system and the increasing impermeable surfaces of urban growth, the city creates its own environmental problems. But not only, examining water flows casts a light on the social territory with its embedded policies of access and fragmentation. Sp(c)lash will be a mapping of flows and friction, collecting reports of “clashes”, and thus identifying the neutral points of intervention within the territory in question.

Through the looking glass.
To skill ourselves in reading territories and landscapes the studio will travel to another, unfamiliar, urban territory and mirror the developed concepts onto the Oslo territory.

Hydropolis.
The studio will imagine Greater Oslo as a territory constructed around its water flows and cycles. It searches for the utopian within and speculates on a radical counter image to what the city is today. How would the metropolitan area be structured, if the physical geography of water, its social use and adaptation to climate change had been the steering principle in its development and its architectures? This is an utopian endeavour - in its wider sense: both critical and forward-looking. From a reading of the territory as a whole, some architectures and developments will be dismissed and re-invented, others will emerge. As architects we will act as creative formalizers with the role of introducing figurative goals into the management of flows.

Let’s go swimming!
What seems to be an attitude of naivety, can be employed as an instrument promoting everyday life as a critical cultural practice. In foregrounding commonplace desires, the ordinary and the colloquial, design emerges without an obligation to architecture as it is usually known. Freed from spectacle, architectural locality may act as an agent of shifting balance between urban space and nature.

With the aim of re-positioning water flows towards a more fundamental role in projects and planning, and exploring how their routing can both be a structuring and a productive element within a socially conceived territory, the studio will explicitly envision architectures and a series of figures that act within, mark and organize the wider field of territorial flows while “giving meaning to the whole environment through its stronger characterization and definition”.