“In architecture books we are bombarded with statistics confirming the ubiquity of the urban condition,

while the symmetrical question is ignored – what are those moving to the city leaving behind?”

Rem Koolhaas, ICON Magazine September 2014: Countryside, “Koolhaas in the country”

This year’s Re Store studio course will continue to creatively analyze and transform existing buildings. The studio will move out of the city to investigate disused buildings in rural Norway. The countryside is a rapidly changing environment that is often overlooked by architects. Critiquing the tendency to romanticise abandoned buildings as nostalgic markers of a bygone era, students will delve into the subject’s material, spatial, and operational qualities. Forensic examination of obsolete architecture will be the first step to understanding the building´s value as an asset to its context. Engaging with the history of the site, both architectural and social, we will re-imagine a future use through deconstruction, repurposing and recycling. Re Store - Field Work studio will collaborate with Tristan Boniver from Rotor, a cooperative design practice based in Brussels that investigates the organisation of the material environment. (http://rotordb.org/)

Seen purely through the lens of the market driven economy, the Norwegian countryside is being kept alive on life support. The agricultural sector contributes to less than 1% of the gross national product and only 1% of the country’s working population is employed in agricultural industries. In Norway however, the countryside is a cultural anchor situated at the core of the nation’s origin myth and identity. Hence, the agricultural industry acts as a conduit for the funnelling of state funds from an increasingly centralised government to the periphery through subsidies. This in turn means that the vast majority of farms are sustained for a sociocultural purpose rather than for a commercial one. This situation is precarious and, financially speaking, unsustainable in the long run. Since the turn of the century, around a third of the agricultural businesses in Norway has closed down, leaving millions of square meters of buildings obsolete and vacant.

The studio will work with the most commonly found building across the Norwegian countryside, the ‘combined unit barn’ (Enhetslåve in Norwegian). The result of nationwide land reforms during the mid-nineteenth century, all these buildings were centrally designed by seven architects. Locally built and refined, the structures were initiators of modernity in rural areas of Norway. The barns were buildings that engaged with the landscape in the most direct way possible, as organisms receiving the growth of the soil and then converting it into fodder, which in turn went back into the fields as manure. This cyclical process, and its refinement over time, shaped the cultural landscape of Norway into its current form.

Designed as large mechanical operations with each floor of the building catering towards a specific part of the nutritional circle, these barns were in effect highly mechanized instruments for a more rational way of farming, resulting in a much greater yield. Advancements in industrialised farming through the twentieth-century led these agricultural structures to became superseded technology. Too expensive to maintain or demolish, today these places of production have come to a standstill. They are now (mere) objects in the landscape they previously formed. The studio will cultivate universally applicable approaches for re-use and transformation of these obsolete giants by activating their finely tuned relationship to the surrounding context and harnessing the potential in their tectonic composition.  

The Enhetslåve at Billerud Farm in Toten, an area well known for its agricultural output and fertile soil, will serve as the case study for the studio. The building is a model example of the typology. The barn is not in active use and the studio will have access to it throughout the semester. The farm at Billerud is an old farm with houses dating back to the 18th century and the main manor house is a fully listed building containing wall murals by the landscape painter and decorator Peder Balke (1804-1887). The visionary painter was not only a romanticist but an interpreter of landscapes through memory and repetition. The studio will make use of a wide range of perspectives in its approach to Billerud Farm. From local history and natural history to the study of contemporary ideas concerning the development and future of the rural countryside. Students will reside in the area for several weeks throughout the semester and will actively be a part of the ongoing discussions with local stakeholders about the future of the building. The studio will address the question of how history, mythology and memory can inform the transformation of well-known architectural structures.