On ice.

At the turn of the 19thcentury, Norway exported more than 1,000,000 tons of ice each year, with vessels going to Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, Constantinople, Africa and even as far as India. Britain was the primary market for Norwegian ice, especially when London summers were hot.

This Norwegian ice, world-famous for being crystal clear, was not simply harvested but were goods manufactured in a complex production economy. To meet the growing demand of natural ice for export, creeks were dammed and ponds were constructed in agricultural areas that already had a functioning shipping infrastructure for heavy loads, such as South Norway and the Oslo region. Ice export proved a perfect complement to the existing economic structure of these areas. Exploiting the links between timber, shipping and ice, sawdust from the timber industry was used for insulation during transport. Ice-mining, including draining and cleaning the lakes from reeds, ploughing the lakes from snow, became an in-between income for local farmers and the shipping crews, with winters being the idle periods. Timber ice houses were built to store the ice blocks. Alone in Asker Kommune, there were 22 constructed ice lakes. The skating rinks of Ila and the bob slides of Holmenkollen surfaced as the social side effect of the ice economy.

The first world war and its blocking of sea routes marked the end of the Anglo-Norwegian ice trade. By then, the science of thermodynamics had facilitated cooling machines, and piping water streams were seen as a hygienic advancement. When refrigerators and freezers gradually became common from the 1950s, also local business gradually disappeared. Water was buried and seasons were rendered invisible. Today the ice lakes are overgrown, filled or have been turned into ponds in public parks.

Why follow up with this gone landscape of ice-making? 
In general terms, the ice lakes reflect that ever since, the balancing of both seasonal differences and geographical allocation of resources have been a driver of cultural landscapes.
The gone landscape of ice lakes was multi-scalar and interweaves the spheres of geological, hydrological, seasonal, social, technological, financial, and economic conditions. It was a productive, highly artificial landscape embedding the time and labour of channelling and damming water flows, draining the resulting water bodies, cleaning their grounds and edges, waiting for the winter to perform its freezing action, cutting the thick and heavy layer of cold and solid water, storing or transporting, using the expertise developed in timber export, always with the risk of melting. 
The ice lakes are a case for medium-scale modifications on water flows taking up agency in economic infrastructure. They embody the fusion of natural conditions and flows with man-made forces into an “organic machine”. They deliver “ecosystem services”, while serviced and maintained. It is their hybrid character of orchestrating natural, social and economic dynamics that forges an “environmental imagination” relevant to our times.

In local terms, the ice lakes’ case could be seen as a model to cope with the challenges of the Oslo region in our age of urbanisation and climate change.
Greater Oslo is a growing region. Historically a water-rich area, weather extremes question the functionality of the cultural landscapes present in the Oslo region. While flooding and its impact on traffic, real estate and water quality in intensively used areas start to be addressed in municipal planning, recently occurring droughts shift attention to water supply and agriculture - and with it to the rather extensively used, wider “support” territory. From a water perspective, the levelling of seasonal peaks asks for new cultural landscapes. The need to re-design water flows, their storage, and distribution could be taken as a kick-off to re-imagine the region beyond inevitably short-falling city-nature dichotomies.

In this context, the studio is a call for the imagination of Greater Oslo. In search for exploitation of the almost inexhaustible social and atmospheric potentials of water for the enhancement of the urban landscape’s quality, and with the aim of re-positioning the hydrosphere towards a fundamental role in planning, the studio will explicitly explore how water can both be a structuring and a productive element within a socially conceived territory, and envision landscapes, architectures and a series of figures that act within, mark and organize the wider field of territorial flows while, as Vittorio Gregotti would demand, “giving meaning to the whole environment through its stronger characterization and definition”.