Start semester
60 619 All you can store
Bachelor in Architecture or Landscape Architecture
CAD 2D and 3D (Rhino), Adobe Suite, hand drawing, analogue model making experience and interest in urbanism and landscape “materials” such as landform, water, soil, plants
Mandatory for 2nd semester Landscape Master students, open to Architecture Master students.
Recomended:
GIS, digital model fabrication
„All you can store!“ takes the infrastructural back-end of urbanism –the storage of goods and water– to the fore and actively explores its potential spatiality and sociality.
As a part of „Oslo Hydropolis“ the studio explores landscape-based, water-sensitive urbanism within the Oslo Metropolitan Region. In face of climate change with its increasing risks of draught and flooding, and continuing urbanisation pressure, the studio proposes a complementary approach to the current paradigm of compact city development –with all its blinds spots such as the relocation of production and storage into areas „out of sight“. It engages the functional requirements of adaptation to changing environmental conditions as much as spatial aesthetics and possible everyday practices.
Concretely, the studio will develop a cross-scalar landscape framework as the basis for development. It will re-consider one of the „out of sight“ locations in current urban debate and propose a counter-proposal to current plans for a logistical park close to Oslo’s airport. The studio accepts the need of large scale storage and will propose concepts of how to embed the programme into the wider landscape context, as well concepts to spatially qualify the emerging structures for both non-human and human usage - if not pleasure.
The conviction of the studio is that here –in a context of large scale layout and buildings, where planning and architecture often fails to pronounce spatial and environmental values– the scope, the frame, the dimensions, the performance, the materials and atmospheres inherent to landscape architecture can provide a long term transformative perspective to urban development.
The methodology of the studio is based on merging planning and design, on oscillating between bird’s eye and eye-level view, as well as on digital and analogue tools.
Knowledge:
The studio will provide students with the conceptual categories to address adaptation to climate change in an urbanising regional context through a landscape architectural perspective. The studio will enter design through the scales of hydrology, and enforce the understanding of landscape as infrastructure as well as a mode of perception. Form will be discussed in relation to performance as well as to space and place.
• Acquaintance of notions of watershed and integrated water management Acquaintance of cultural landscape as a spatial product of geological and climatic forces as well as cultural, political and economical interests and practices layered in time
• Basic knowledge of landscape as a productive, performative layer in human systems: ecological infrastructure, ecosystem services, and regenerative agriculture
Advanced knowledge of form and urban form: application of landscape ecology’s structural concepts to shape spaces and places; landscape pattern
Skills:
Students develop skills to envision urban projects as embedded within cultural landscapes with the goal to ensure adaptability to climate change. Research-driven, multi-layered and multi-scalar in its scope, the studio builds the capacity to conduct a layered and visual analysis of the territorial/ regional context, the ability to reference precedents, to fuse technical and aesthetic aspects of form giving, and finally to frame and argue for a well-resolved design proposal anchored within the scale of the territory.
- Research: Capacity to select and sort, and evaluate data from greater information quantities; ability to conduct precedent analysis and transfer
- Analysis: ability to carry out landscape analysis based on map work (GIS and morphological analysis) and field work (photography)
- Strategy: capability to develop scenarios for a watershed, development of propositions related to water flows and cycles for concrete case areas
- Iterative design process: trial and error to find adequate solutions, successive and interrogative usage of drawings, plans, sections, physical and digital models, as well as texts variants, to test and develop proposals, in favour for “unsafe” experimental approaches
- Interrogative design: explicit discussion of a formal question, such as grids, patches, edges, corridors or figures organizing a spatial field
- Design resolution: ability to work out a territorial approach on a detailed level, including grading, planting, surface textures
- Representation: capability to illustrate design through compelling plans, sections, as well as digital and physical models and model photography
- Communication: problem definition, framing of a task within the given context of the studio; skill to verbally and visually argue for a project through telling of a compelling narrative
General competence:
The studio’s underlying thesis will encourage the rethinking of urban and environmental challenges as opportunities to develop place-specific and social spaces for the future. The studio’s main competence goal is to equip students with the ability to to frame their projects in a larger socially and environmentally relevant context, state ideas, translate these into form, and to apply theoretical and technical background in project work, as well as to use the project as an investigative vehicle to address professional and disciplinary questions. Both individual and group work will be trained.
Group work (2-3 students) and individual work is organised around 5 phases.
The phases will be supported by input lectures to facilitate familiarization with discourse and workshops to kick-off design.
1. SEARCH 1:1 / 1:50.000/ 1:7500 – Portrait of a Landscape. What is the character of the landscape? How has it evolved? What are its strengths? Where are its vulnerabilities?
- „Journalistic" Research
- Morphological Analysis GIS, CAD Plan 1:50.000 - 1:7500
- Documentary Site Photography
- Tracing of landform, water structure and landuse pattern, hand drawing
- Writing of a story
2. SCENARIO 1:7500 /1:1000 – Development of a Landscape Framework for a logistic park along different scenarios regarding the degree of transformation and political ambition.
- “Transplant” of large scale landscape architectures and agricultural principles of water storage onto the site, „scenario plan" drawing
- Laser-cut “Paper lace" of Landscape Framework
- Physical sketch model with topography, vegetation as mass and void
3. SCENE 1: Eye-level / 1: 100 – Development of the spatial and material qualities of the Landscape Framework through a „Scene“
- Scenographic model photography of a spatial scene with vegetation, ground and water at eye-level
- Detail plan and section of the Landscape Framework
4. SYNTHESIS 1:7500 / 1:2000, 1:1000/ 1:500, 1:100/1:50, 1:20 – Elaboration of a detail area of landscape framework as a landscape and architectural proposal with a focus on the public space
- Iteration of „scenario plan"
- Digitally fabricated physical model
- Section, plan of selected space
5. SPREAD the message – Visualization and “telling” the proposals to communicate to a broader audience.
- Oral and visual presentation of project
- Curation and production of an exhibition (AHO works)
- Production of a studio booklet that can serve to advance the imaginary on the Oslo Region as a „Hydropolis“
Excursion:
The studio will travel to Barcelona and environments to study public space typologies in urban and rural contexts. Transport, accommodation, and food will be on the expense of students. Those who cannot/do not wish to join the trip will study comparable typologies in Oslo.
Link to course literature will be registered in Leganto
| Mandatory coursework | Courseworks required | Presence required | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Presence required | Required |
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project assignment | Group | Pass / fail |