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2017 Vår

Start semester

Material History: Reading and Design of Structures

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Material History: Reading and Design of Structures
Credits: 
6
Course code: 
80 408
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Verbal and written command of English language.

Course content

This is an introductory course to the history of construction materials and construction techniques.

This course departs from the fundamental premise that structure is an integral part of an architectural creation, that architecture and structure are one and the same, and that they march together in all great built works.

Structures are unique to their designer/maker. A structural principle, a detail, can embody and abstract an entire architectural idea. Yet, in the recent decades an increase in specialization has led to a division of labor in the building industry that has separated the responsibilities of the design of the building in general from the design of the materials and structure -one pertaining the to the architect and the other to the engineer.

Today, this division is barely overcome, many architects lacking much understanding of the consequences of their design choices, in terms of form, technique and material. And many engineers subjected to the mere calculation of possible solutions, often alienated from the creative process from the get-go.

Setting aside the distinction between the architect and the engineer, this seminar will discuss structure, not only in its physical manifestations, but also as a set of arrangements and relations between the parts or elements of a system that comprise a whole. Is the structure in a text, a film or a drawing comparable to that of a building? Thus the seminar will cover structures, ranging from their most abstract form to the very physical act of construction.

How did the invention of rolled steel changed the course of history in architecture and the world?

How did François Hennebique, who developed a calculation system to reinforce concrete, take architects and engineers away from the site and into the studio, allowing them to spend more time on their designs?

How did Corbusier make the roof of Ronchamp float?

What did the construction of World Trade Center teach about prefabrication to architects around the world?

Following the evolution of an idea into an image, a construction drawing, the building site, building logistics and execution, we will examine the basic physical properties of construction materials; identify and brake down structural concepts; and learn about building techniques through short exercises and the analysis of several case studies.

Learning outcome

Participants will be introduced to a comprehensive history of building engineering and structural design. From primitive forms of building to more complex state of the art construction projects, participants will learn not only how to read structures, but also how design with the properties of the materials and execution process in mind. In other words, how to design not only form, but also its construction process.

Participants will gain an understanding the evolution of the architectural thought and practice across time. The course is presented through a set of case studies, so participants will learn about the design and execution of relevant works of architecture in relation to the time and architectural ambitions of the author(s).

The goal of this class is in part for the concept of ‘structure’ to be understood as radical (inherent) to the architectural practice in its own right, and not something that needs be applied after the conception of an architectural idea.

Participants will be introduced to structural concepts, load analysis, material testing technologies and building logistics.

Working and learning activities

Every session will review first, one relevant structural/material invention and applications and, second, constellations of related projects and ideas will be presented in detail and thoroughly discussed.

Parallel to the class discussions, students will work with model-making and drawing on analytical exercises.
During the fordypningsuke participants will work on a week long exercise dealing with structural principles and building prototypes.

Curriculum

·         Architecture without Architects, Bernard Rudolfsky

·         An Engineer Imagines, Peter Rice

·         Space Calculated in Seconds: The Philips Pavilion,  Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse

·         Seven Structural Engineers: The Candela Lectures, Anderson, Balmond, Robertson, Isler, Kawaguchi, Menn, Schlaic; Edited by Guy Nordenson.

·         Patterns and Structure, Guy Nordenson

·         Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, Philip Ursprung

·         Structure Systems, Heino Engel

·         Tensile structures; design, structure, and calculation of buildings of cables, nets, and membranes, Frei Otto.

 

Mandatory courseworkPresence requiredComment
Presence requiredNot requiredStudents are expected to attend all meetings and be active contributors and participants. Delivery of all exercises is mandatory.
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Mandatory coursework:Presence required
Presence required:Not required
Comment:Students are expected to attend all meetings and be active contributors and participants. Delivery of all exercises is mandatory.

Start semester

Re-Store: Maintenance

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Re-Store: Maintenance
Credits: 
24
Course code: 
80 608
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Det kreves ingen forkunnskaper utover opptakskrav i studieprogrammet.

Course content

Re-Store: Maintenance
In the 1984 film …men Olsenbanden var ikke død, Edvard Munch’s Scream is stolen and smuggled down the hose of a vacuum cleaner by a thief masquerading as a cleaning lady. She escapes the museum unseen, cloaked by the ordinariness of maintenance.

Society places little value on the status of maintenance work in private, domestic and public space. In Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Manifesto she states “Maintenance is a drag: it takes all the fucking time. The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom.” Laderman Ukeles, a feminist, an artist and housewife equates the daily activities of maintenance, from the domestic to the urban scale, with her artistic endeavor.

This year the Re-Store studio will seek to understand maintenance as a key form of preservation and preservation as an act of maintenance. The unassuming banality of maintenance systems allows them to surreptitiously become destructive and constructive acts of preservation. We will explore the impact of acts of maintenance as they transcend the preservation of cities, buildings and objects.

Cities
“Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Maintenance Manifesto

We will explore maintenance as inherently revolutionary and fundamental to social order, and how it provokes us to challenge existing structures, physical or political, and to question their adequacy. Without maintenance, changing policies, evolving building codes and developing technology, architecture quickly becomes obsolete.

Taking the Munchmuseet as a case study, we shall respond to the long-term research project City of Dislocation, which was recently conducted for Oslo Pilot. The project identifies that within the next few years, the government’s policy of centralization will affect more than twenty of Oslo’s biggest institutions, each abandoning their purpose-built headquarters, either because of relocation or closure. A driving factor of this restructuring is a consensus that these buildings no longer perform adequately. This process will generate a network of voids and empty buildings in every neighborhood of the city.

The Munchmuseet is one of these empty voids. Located in the residential area of Tøyen, it is one of the institutions soon to be relocated. The museum was built in the multicultural working class neighborhood of east Oslo in 1963 as part of an urban strategy to distribute cultural institutions throughout the city. The building was built to maintain and preserve Munch’s collection but has been deemed no longer fit for purpose and will be left vacant in need of new inhabitation. If retained by the city, do these vacant sites risk dilapidation, their maintenance too costly for the municipality? Will we see a continuing trend towards the commercialization of the built environment as heritage sites are sold to the highest bidder? The key question is how to dismantle a cultural object during times of change - a hitherto unexplored aspect of Oslo’s development.

Buildings
Maintenance facilitates inhabitation by keeping the necessary standard for a building’s intended use. Strategies for re-use and recycling of construction materials are being written into building and planning codes. Parallel to these developments, the deferment of maintenance accelerates the deterioration of buildings. Similarly, strategies of planned obsolescence are reducing building life spans at an alarming pace.

We will challenge the fetishisation of the Munchmuseet as a ‘complete architectural object’ by exploring it as an ensemble of fragments embodied with their own meaning. By tracing the patterns of use from the residues of human occupation, students will develop an understanding of what has been used and how. This work will grow out of the translations between observing, drawing and making - to discover possibilities in what already exists. As Bruno Latour said, ‘there is no such thing as design today, there is only re-design.’

Objects
The creation of Munch’s paintings took place using materials prone to deterioration. This has resulted in the continual reassessment of their condition, requiring conservators to make frequent value judgments on the scope of preservation. The studio will celebrate the everyday acts of cleaning, washing, mending, adapting, reusing, recycling and preserving embodied in the scale of the object. By starting with the object of the painting, students will chart the constellation of objects that maintain it, and by extension the building that frames it. The scale of architecture comes out of the scale of the object – and just as the museum was designed to house one painting, embedded in its material details is an expression of the tools that maintain it.

Learning outcome

Through the prism of maintenance systems, the studio will provide a foundation to critically evaluate different ways of approaching the re-use and transformation of existing structures at varying scales. Students will accrue knowledge on how to formulate individual architectural proposals based on close observation and analysis of present conditions. Actively working with current issues affecting Oslo will provide in-depth insights into the ongoing public discourse around the preservation of some of the city’s most important historical sites.

The studio will provide specific knowledge on the history and techniques of preservation.

Working and learning activities

The studio will be divided into two stages. The first will use the ‘catalogue’ as a record of the surprising layers of maintenance systems that are employed within the Munchmuseet. Students will collaboratively amass an index of the relevant elements of the building through a variety of techniques of measurement, surveying and recording. Qualitative judgements will be suspended whilst we accumulate quantitative research. The catalogue will define the parameters of maintenance to include urban planning, procurement process, design specifications, maintenance regimes and the physical performance of maintenance itself.

During the second and most extensive phase, students will use these ingredients to form the basis of individual design proposals for the future inhabitation of the Munchmuseet. These architectural interventions will negotiate the scale of objects, buildings and cities. We will develop proposals for the adaptation and appropriation of the museum, and in doing so, generate a personal system of preservation that can be implemented within the wider context of a developing Oslo.

A series of joint seminars and workshops will be organized in collaboration with the Architectural Association school of Architecture, London.

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required
Form of assessmentGroupingGrading scaleComment
Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)IndividualPass / failThe studio will be evaluated by submitting assignments and participation, judged as “passed” or “not passed” (according to AHO regulations for master studies).
Vurderinger:
Form of assessment:Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Comment:The studio will be evaluated by submitting assignments and participation, judged as “passed” or “not passed” (according to AHO regulations for master studies).

Start semester

Landscape Architecture, Space Light and Landscape

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Landscape Architecture, Space Light and Landscape
Credits: 
6
Course code: 
60 404
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Det kreves ingen forkunnskaper utover opptakskrav i studieprogrammet.

Course content

One of the most characteristic features of Landscape Architecture is a considerable degree of freedom of design, but freedom based on both functional and aesthetic requirements.
Prehab’s it is the longevity of trees that encourages simplicity of artistic and architectural design, providing gardens with a sense of universal permanence despite the changes taking place in society around them. Gardens should be functional and yet simple in design.

Learning outcome

After passed course, the student shall understand how ecological, infrastructural factors shape the urban landscape, and have broad knowledge of landscape architecture’s themes and concepts.
The way in which the elements of gardens and parks are organized provides a fundamental impression of space, design and scope, thus reflecting something of the essence of both architecture art and sculpture.

Working and learning activities

Lectures will focus on decisive moments within the landscape architectural discourse: analysis, project development, design processes, the lectures are project based.
8 lectures Tuesday mornings 9:30-11:00 from January to May:

• Lecture 1: January Jeppe Aagaard Andersen «Meeting places”
• Lecture 2: February Jeppe Aagaard Andersen: “City Paving”
• Lecture 3: February Marco Berentz: “Territories for dreaming”
• Lecture 4: February Hanne bat: “Common sense ore science”
• Lecture 5: March Jeppe Aagaard Andersen: “Heritage and interpretation”
• Lecture 6: March Vladimir Sitta: “Small to big in the Southern hemisphere”
• Lecture 7: April Samin Salehi: “Paradise gardens Iran”
• Lecture 8: April Jeppe Aagaard Andersen; “It’s all about water”

Presence requiredComment
Not requiredThe studens have to produce 2 A4 steets after each lecture with a summery and an inspiration drawing from the topic.
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required
Comment:The studens have to produce 2 A4 steets after each lecture with a summery and an inspiration drawing from the topic.
GroupingGrading scale
IndividualPass / fail
IndividualPass / fail
Vurderinger:
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail

Start semester

Images of Egypt

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Images of Egypt
Credits: 
6
Course code: 
80 407
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Person in charge
Mari Lending
Required prerequisite knowledge

BA
This elective course is integral to, and a mandatory part of, OCCAS studio: Egypt.

Course content

Ancient Egypt has kept its spell on the European mind across centuries. After the French-British battle of dominance of the area since the late eighteenth century, followed by the massive relocation of Egyptian antiquities to European museums, the interest has but increased. For two centuries, Egyptian imagery has echoed in European architecture, art, design, fashion and fiction. This seminar looks into images of Egypt as represented in world exhibitions and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth century. We will watch a number of movies, read novels, dig into the illustrated press, and follow depictions of Egypt – factual and fictitious – across media.

Debates on orientalism and myths will provide the theoretical framework for our work on images, as addressed in political science, comparative literature and exhibition studies since the 1970.

‘Images of Egypt’ pertains to the OCCAS studio: Egypt, run as part of OCCAS’ new, international research project Printing the Past (PriArc), part of the EU research program ”Uses of the Past”.

Learning outcome

Knowledge: The students will gain insights into debates on orientalism, cultural geopolitics, visual analysis, as well as fiction.

Skills: The seminar will give training in academic thinking and practice, and how to work with historical and contemporary sources, objects, and documents in many media.

General Competence: Readings and seminars will provide the students with insight into political, cultural, and anthropological perspectives on Egypt and the orient. In a broader sense, it will enable students to deal with visual material in a critical manner. Furthermore, the course will equip students with academic reasoning skills as well as abilities to present arguments in oral, visual, and written forms.

Working and learning activities

We will discuss texts and visual material on a weekly basis. Occasionally we will invite national and international scholars to give talks on various aspects of the seminar.

Curriculum

Recommended reading:

 

Amale Andraos and Nora Akawi (eds.), The Arab City: Architecture and Representation (NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016) (excerpts)

Yasmine el Rashidi, Chronicles of a Last Summer. A novel of Egypt (NY: Tim Duggan Books, 2016).

Lucia Allais, “The Salvage of Abu Simbel,” Grey Room (winter, 2004).

Mary Beard, “Cleopatra: The Myth” The New York Review of Books, January 13, 2011 and “Cleopatra. From History to Myth,” London Review of Books, March, 2003).

Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). (excerpts)

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). (excerpts)

Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978). (excerpts)

Naguib Mahfouz, The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57). (excerpts)

Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960). (excerpts)

Gustav Flaubert, Salammbô (1862)

Various images/articles from nineteenth and twentieth century illustrated journals.

A number of classical Hollywood movies on Egypt + the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar!

 

 

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required
Form of assessmentGroupingGrading scaleComment
ReportIndividualPass / failEach student will hand in a well-illustrated essay for assessment and give a presentation of the selected theme with emphasize on the selected visual material. The essay and the presentation will be examined by two external censors.
Vurderinger:
Form of assessment:Report
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Comment:Each student will hand in a well-illustrated essay for assessment and give a presentation of the selected theme with emphasize on the selected visual material. The essay and the presentation will be examined by two external censors.
Workload activityComment
Individual problem solvingThe elective course welcomes students able to work innovatively and independently with scholarly source material (textual and visual).
Forventet arbeidsinnsats:
Workload activity:Individual problem solving
Comment:The elective course welcomes students able to work innovatively and independently with scholarly source material (textual and visual).

Start semester

Iconoscapes: Journeying through representations and realities of Northern territories

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Iconoscapes: Journeying through representations and realities of Northern territories
Credits: 
20
Course code: 
65 603
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Required prerequisite knowledge

A completed Bachelor in Landscape Architecture or Architecture from university or university college.

Course content

The course explores sites in a territory that unfold to reveal further sites of interest – it is, in a sense, about exploring landscapes within landscapes. The course ventures into past, present and future territories through the lens of different visual media, that is: still and moving imagery – from paintings to film. By exploring the diverse media tools available to landscape architects, the course will critically assess the merits and downfalls of looking at the territory from the traditional/historic fixed point through to moving, sequential scenes that we are more familiar with today. But are these images being used as a tool of showing how a place intends to be conveyed or how they actually are? Have we become spectators more than participants? The course will address these questions and will essentially question the landscape architect’s position on how landscapes should be or can be represented in northern contexts.

Using the image as a tool when approaching a territory allows us to engage with the tangible and intangible components of a particular site. Instead of maintaining a distanced view of the territory, the course will keep engagement in focus. By delving into the material components and conditions that shape a territory we can understand and reveal the dynamic processes at play when working with the appropriate tools. By applying and interweaving the appropriate tools to the design process a wealth of material can emerge from just one point of the territory. Students will be asked to creatively respond to the complexities of the image and to transition from encounter to engagement through the use of media tools in a design process.

Learning outcome

a. Knowledge:
• Students will learn of the historic and cultural processes that inform the way landscape and territories are intended to be viewed. These theoretical aspects of the course will be presented through literature, films and lectures. The knowledge will be applied to various assignments on the course where students will learn of the application of theory to design.
• Knowledge pertaining to the representation, depiction and description of territories over time will be explored throughout the course.
• Students will be introduced to the broad spectrum of techniques adopted by artists, film-makers and landscape architects in the representation of landscape/territory. Critical thinking of representation techniques will be encouraged throughout the course in informal discussions and formal critiques.
• The course will explore methods on how to reveal and include materiality in an image or moving image to inform and strengthen the design process that can be applied to professional advancement of the students work or as tools for experimentation.

b. Skills:
• Students will be introduced to the evolution of the image pertaining to landscapes and territories.
• Students will learn of the various methods and techniques in which landscapes and territories have been historically represented and to speculate how they should be represented in the future.
• Students will develop skills on how to use sound, images and/or film during different phases of the design process and assess the strengths and weaknesses of such methods.
• Ability to work independently and in groups throughout the studio.
• Students will learn how to apply theory relating to territorial representation to their own work.
• This course will ask students to look at a territory from a range of scales. This will develop competence in applying appropriate scales and tools to the site being studied.
• Students will be taught the importance of successful communication of their own work through the way they represent their work. The way students’ work is conveyed and received by others is an important aspect that students must consider in their work output.

c. General competence:
• A good and well-informed knowledge of the use of images representing landscapes and territories with the ability to be critical of approaches and methods used.
• A knowledge of the methods and skills adopted by artists/landscape architects representing landscapes/territories.
• Abilities to refine large quantities of research information into concise and appropriate means.
• Communicate studio work effectively, through visual and oral presentations, to both landscape architects and other professionals related to heritage.

Working and learning activities

• Lectures including those from external sources e.g. UiT, Polar Institute input, local art museums
• Studio work – individual and group work
• Study trip during the semester

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required
Form of assessmentGroupingGrading scaleComment
Project assignmentIndividualPass / failThis course is assessed as Passed/Failed based on at least 80% participation. Project evaluation. Project will be developed in the course of the studio, and presented in written and visual form. Final evaluation by an external examiner.
Vurderinger:
Form of assessment:Project assignment
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Comment:This course is assessed as Passed/Failed based on at least 80% participation. Project evaluation. Project will be developed in the course of the studio, and presented in written and visual form. Final evaluation by an external examiner.
Comment
media studies eg editing sound and video
Forventet arbeidsinnsats:
Comment:media studies eg editing sound and video

Start semester

Sp(C)lash, let’s go swimming! - Envisioning Architectures of Water within Greater Oslo

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Sp(C)lash, let’s go swimming! - Envisioning Architectures of Water within Greater Oslo
Credits: 
24
Course code: 
60 612
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Passed foundation level courses/ Bachelor, open to architecture master students and landscape master students.

Course content

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”.

Learning outcome

a. Knowledge:
The design research studio will provide students with the integrated and conceptual categories to address the complex, multi-layered and interrelated issues of urban, ecological and social sustainability from the intersecting perspective of urbanism, architecture and landscape design. A focus will be a hydrological perspective on design, the management of flows within a socially and economically biased context and the anchoring of architectural interventions within the scale of watersheds.

b. Skills:
Concretely, students will develop skills in the critical transformation of already built out urban areas under high development pressure from a landscape and hydrological perspective.
Students will train technical skills in representation as a critical tool, ranging from GIS to hand drawing and collage. Students will acquire methodological skills from the creation of interpretative maps and projective cartography, to precedent analysis and transfer, strategic scenario development, as well as proposition of concrete designs out of the strategic approach. This involves a multi-scalar ability to move fluently between the territorial, urban and architectural scales.

c. General competence:
The studio’s underlying thesis will encourage the rethinking of urban, social and environmental challenges as opportunities to develop liveable and just spaces. Students will develop an adequate professional vocabulary and communication skills.

Working and learning activities

The studio elaborates on multi-scalar design methods and approaches to support context-responsive, socially and ecologically committed urbanism and architecture in relation to already existing urban structures.

Individual and group work of the studio is organized around five phases:

“Atlas of Sp(C)lashes” - Mapping of, the one hand, different urban layers such as geology, hydrology, climatology, as well as urban structure, density, growth pattern, and social and economical structure on the territorial scale with GIS and, on the other hand, everyday usages and landscape reading through field work.

“Through the looking glass” - Research: Familiarization with precedent projects, notions of democratic space and productive water management techniques through input lectures and student presentations on tool boxes; off-site (travel requiring) workshop, comparative projecting.

“Hydropolis” - Scenario: Development of strategic transformation scenarios on an urban and territorial scale, based on urban precedents.

“Let’s go swimming” - Pilot project: Elaboration of the design strategies into individual architectural, public space and landscape proposals.

Communication: Visualization and “telling” the proposals to communicate to a broad audience. Production of a studio booklet that can serve as a tool to advance the discussion on water urbanism.

Work effort.
The building of a body of collective knowledge and the exchange of ideas are essential to the studio. All students are expected to work in the studio, not off-campus. Studio days are Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
All students will have a desk-crit of research or design-work at least once a week. New work to discuss is expected for each desk-crit.
Each phase of the studio work will conclude with a presentation or review. Presence and presenting at 80% of the presentation dates is mandatory to pass the course.

The studio is planning on building a topographical physical model of Greater Oslo; we will need the workshop for a week and technical support.

Curriculum

A studio apparatus will be available at the library.

Sarté, Bry and Morana Stipisic. 2016. Water infrastructure Equitable Development of Resilient Systems. New York: Columbia GSAPP.

Gandy, Matthew. 2014. The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press.

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering urbanism: networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London: Routledge

Gregotti, Vittorio.1985.Territory and architecture, in: Architectural Design Profile 59 no.5-6, pp28-34.

Gregotti, Vittorio.1993. Architecture, Environment, Nature, in Ockmann, Joan, 1993: Architecture Culture, New York, Rizzoli

Fainstein, Susan S. 2010. The just city. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Hals, Harald. 1929. Fra Christiania til Stor-Oslo: et forslag til generalplan for Oslo. Oslo: Aschehoug.

Hough, Michael. 2006. Cities and natural process: a basis for sustainability. London [u.a.]: Routledge.

Marsh, William M., and Jeff Dozier. 1981. Landscape, an introduction to physical geography. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.

McGrath, Brian. 2013. Urban design ecologies. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley.

Mollison, B. C. 1988. Permaculture: a designer's manual. Tyalgum, Australia: Tagari Publications.

Saarinen, Eliel. 1943. The city, its growth, its decay, its future. New York: Reinhold Pub. Corp.

Spirn, Anne Whiston. 1998. The language of landscape. New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press.

Stichting OASE (Netherlands). 2009. On territories = Over territoria. Rotterdam: NAi Uitgevers.

(to be completed)

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required
Form of assessmentGroupingGrading scaleComment
Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)IndividualPass / failThe work will be evaluated through oral and graphic presentations as well as digital hand-ins (moodle) at the end of each of the different studio phases. Final grade will be based on an assessment of all the hand-ins (portfolio assessment). Presence and presenting at 80% of the presentation dates is mandatory to pass the course.
Vurderinger:
Form of assessment:Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Comment:The work will be evaluated through oral and graphic presentations as well as digital hand-ins (moodle) at the end of each of the different studio phases. Final grade will be based on an assessment of all the hand-ins (portfolio assessment). Presence and presenting at 80% of the presentation dates is mandatory to pass the course.

Start semester

Eksternt kurs (UiT)

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Eksternt kurs (UiT)
Credits: 
10
Course code: 
EKSTERN
Level of study: 
PhD
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
Norwegian / English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Det kreves ingen forkunnskaper utover opptakskrav i studieprogrammet.

Learning outcome

Kunnskaper
Ved gjennomført studium skal studenten;

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required

Landscape Urbanism in Practice

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Landscape Urbanism in Practice
Credits: 
6
Course code: 
60 401
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
English
Course content

The contemporary city, with its processes of upscaling and rapid mutation, produces, together with great possibilities also great contradictions and risks that question the very idea of a city. Emerging are new forms of spatial inequalities and injustice, new problems of metabolism related with the management of in-out flows (such as water, energy, goods, people) and their carrying structures. These processes are related resulting in a more difficult and uncertain condition.

This condition challenges the role of designer and design practice as a specific means of knowledge production. Does this condition, “between chaos and potentials” (Koolhaas 2014) make the project of the contemporary city and territory possible? What are the constitutive features of a project that is able to absorb these contradictions and create new conditions of possibilities in the framework of a meaningful order?

The praxis and reflection of different agents are today reframing the fields of urbanism and landscape architecture; new concepts and principles replace others at the centre of these disciplines and guide the construction of new discursive as well as spatial forms. Landscape Urbanism is one of the successful neologisms. In the notion of Landscape Urbanism, positions converge that have in common the retrieval of concepts such as memory, social utility and ecology. A depth that leads to new forms of description and prefiguration.

As cultural construct, landscape is made and remade. The interpretation of landscapes imply - using the terms of Umberto Eco - the distinction between the “intentionality of the author”, that is what the author wants to communicate; the intentionality of the “reader”, that is what the reader interpret and use. And the “intentionality of the work itself”, that is what - independently from the intentionality of the author – the constructed landscape suggests remaining open to new interpretations.

Learning outcome

The scope of the course is improving the interpretative and projective toolkit of the designer as reflective practitioner. The course will explore themes, approaches and tools (conceptual and practical) throughout a sequence of critical operations that complement each other and take place both in the studio and as fieldwork. In particular, the students will be engaged in three types of critical reading; reading of essays by relevant authors (rhetorical analysis), reading of real-world-space (film and photography) and reading of spatial projects (mapping).

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required

Start semester

Places, objects, tools

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Places, objects, tools
Credits: 
6
Course code: 
40 406
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
Norwegian / English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Det kreves ingen forkunnskaper utover opptakskrav i studieprogrammet.

Course content

The transition from architecture as a material profession to a fluid practice of hybrid sites, digital working spaces and global interconnectivity has rapidly changed not only the tools architects use, but also the way in which they intellectually engage the world they design.

Central to this transformation are some of architecture’s core conventions; the site in which an object sits, the working space in which the architect designs, and the tools which the architect uses, having morphed from the ink of the pen to vectors, meshes, nurbs and projections.

Actively shaping this transition requires the architect to not only command the workflows of contemporary digital practice but also to critically challenge the theoretical context in which the tools are formed.
The course consists of 4 exercises. Each exercise pairs a core design task within the digital realm with a core reading spanning from architecture, critical theory, art, and philosophy specific to the themes of places, objects, and tools.

Students are asked through these exercises to both solve a design task whilst providing their own theoretical argument inspired from the provided texts through their own project descriptions in writing and through verbal presentation. Each exercise lasts 2-3 weeks and concludes with common discourse with invited guests.

Learning outcome

The students will learn a set of core design tools for working in a contemporary architectural environment, including: 3d-model sourcing, 3d-printing, 3d-scanning, VR- modelling, analytical drawings, Photoshop, and physical model making.

The students will familiarize themselves with central texts related to technology spanning from early modernism to the contemporary context.

The students will learn to intellectually reflect upon the theoretical implications of their design work and learn to build a theoretical background in which to expand their own design studies and research.

The students will learn to write short descriptive texts of their design exercises and learn to verbally present their ideas amongst colleagues.

The students will familiarize themselves with current design work engaging architectural heritage, 3d-archiving, VR environments and 3d-prototyping and will be asked to provide a personal speculation upon the future of digital technologies in architecture and design

Working and learning activities

Short 2 – 3 week continuous design exercises paired with a text.

Deliverables each week spanning from screenshots with a short description to larger models, images and drawings.

Lectures, tutorials and discussions as required.

An optional expansive syllabus will be provided and students are encouraged to read it.

Mandatory courseworkPresence requiredComment
Annet - spesifiser i kommentarfeltetNot requiredAll exercises and readings are mandatory.
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Mandatory coursework:Annet - spesifiser i kommentarfeltet
Presence required:Not required
Comment:All exercises and readings are mandatory.
Form of assessmentGroupingGrading scaleComment
Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)IndividualPass / failFour assignments + a main assignment will be assessed at the end of the semester. For each assignment a text is distributed and is mandatory to read. All assignments are mandatory and will be assessed by an external critic. The students need to submit all assignments and participate in all lectures to pass the course. Students who are in danger of failing will be notified in advance by the teacher.
Vurderinger:
Form of assessment:Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe)
Grouping:Individual
Grading scale:Pass / fail
Comment:Four assignments + a main assignment will be assessed at the end of the semester. For each assignment a text is distributed and is mandatory to read. All assignments are mandatory and will be assessed by an external critic. The students need to submit all assignments and participate in all lectures to pass the course. Students who are in danger of failing will be notified in advance by the teacher.

Diplom design

Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål: 
Diplom design
Credits: 
30
Course code: 
12 802
Level of study: 
Master
Teaching semester: 
2017 Spring
Language of instruction: 
Norwegian / English
Required prerequisite knowledge

Completed pre-diploma and 270 ECTS in total.

Learning outcome

Kunnskaper
Ved gjennomført studium skal studenten;

Ferdigheter
Ved gjennomført studium skal studenten;

Generell kompetanse
Ved gjennomført studium skal studenten;

Presence required
Not required
Obligatoriske arbeidskrav:
Presence required:Not required

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