2021 Vår

The architectural  threshold is a (physical/ mental) space encapsulating a change; it initiates movement or a change in a state of mind to another; affecting the experience of architectural space. The idea of threshold has been an operative metaphor across disciplines among which are architectural, urban, social, and artistic studies. Historically, thresholds, in their various forms and definitions, played a significant role in both function and integral experience of architecture.

A threshold is a space of transition from one state to another that could imply a sense of contingency. It is indeterminate and carries a sense of temporality. Its domain of presence spans over the experience of the sequence of movement through built spaces, to leftover spaces or voids, or to the natural environment. A threshold is the vestibule of experience.

Instant connections and rapid movement are the intellect of the era and for many, slowness and contemplation that transitive spaces provide is considered a time sink. As a result, transitional spaces are losing their value and meaning by the over-emphasis on spaces that accommodate main functions in cities and buildings, or by being treated as service areas. Evidently, this also minimizes their scope of spatial experience.

The course attempts to redraw attention to thresholds that derive from relations and interrelations between built space and its natural surrounding environment. The course  consists of comprehensive reverse readings of  selected thresholds together with the reinterpretation and reconstruction through the learnings gained from the reverse readings. We will be working on various techniques from photography and drawing to model making and a well-crafted short descriptive text, as complementary to the scaled model, for the final review.

The elective is organized around a set of analytical and critical readings. The readings consist of a selective number of texts from literature and theory of architecture that successfully capture the significance of the notion of threshold and transition. The analytical works include investigations on selected thresholds that span from critical analysis of an integral experience of the threshold to studies on the spatial and structural elements which constitute  it (i.e. materials’ properties, positions, and relations). Through the understanding gained, students will  investigate  the tectonics and atmosphere of that threshold through collage visualization and scaled models.

Oslo: Blue, green, and the city in-between.
This marketing rhyme is constantly challenged with Oslo being at the very centre of a growing region. To accommodate the influx of inhabitants municipalities re-zone agricultural land for the development of urban districts, often using boulevards and city blocks as their formal repertoires. Civil opposition, understandably riding the arguments of ecology, history and connectivity, are the consequences – while the cultural reservations towards compact urban development remain forceful but less explicit drivers. 

What if we radically reverse the approach of urban development? And start from the water and vegetal structures to generate contemporary forms of dwelling?
There are reasons enough. 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, the recently occurring droughts shift attention to water supply – 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. To be bold: Could urban development be the incentive of the required hydrological and ecological transformation?
Oslo: Blue, green, and the city in-between. The rhyme would then mean both to intertwine urban life into concise and perceptible landscape structures and to have human settlement play an active role in the re-adjustment of the hydrological cycle to the changing climate. 

Make Do with Water – Make Water Do.
In this context the studio subscribes to an oscillating mode of action: Make Do with Water – Make Water Do. “Make Do with” means to get along with what is available, to manage with the limited or even inadequate means available. It means to adapt to and to creatively accept the given. For urban development (rain) water is one of those available means, an enabling and limiting resource at hand. On another take, to “Make s.th. Do” means to enable, to empower, and have s.th. do the job. Urban and landscape practices actively change and modify water flows and cycles. Can urbanism team up with water’s active role in structuring space, regulating climate and creating opportunities for cultural practices? The studio proposes a shift from water as a passive resource to an agent taking part in developing a future cultural landscape.

Both modes of action – passive and active – require an aesthetic position along with the functional and performative imperatives. Make Water Do is finally a call for projects that support an environmental imagination in which urbanism and ecology are informing each other. 

In sum, the studio explores landscape-based, water-active 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 blue-green infrastructure at the very basis of new low density settlements. It engages the functional requirements of adaptation to changing environmental conditions as much as the spatial and environmental aesthetics of flowing and cycling water as an agent of urbanism. 

The studio is thus an inquiry into future cultural landscapes beyond perceived city/countryside or culture/nature or planned/unplanned dichotomies, and how these contribute to an idea of dwelling within urban nature.

A strategic building block of an emerging national identity, The National Theatre of Oslo  – also known as the home of Ibsen with the Enemy of State as its opening act – was already too small at its inauguration in 1899.  After discussions of expansion and upgrading since the 1930ies, governemntal support is finally in place and a feasability study on planning and programming is currently in process. The overdue rennovation and rebuilding is set to start in 2022.

As a consequence; the National Theatre will soon be out of house in need of a temporary stage - estimated to last for 6 years or more.

A period just long enough to question; at what point and to what degree can the temporary become the new permanent?

The studio will use this pocket of opportunity to investiate the notions of temporality, circularity and the city.  This new theatre, its position and the public interior as idea and large scale project will be our area of study, experiments and architectural manifestation.  

The THEATRE

From Palladios Olympic Theatre to Prices Fun Palace, via Lina Bo Bardis Teatro Oficina and Teatro del Mondo by Rossi. From the classical to the avantgarde, from abstraction to reality, from street theatre and japanese Noh to the technologically advanced,

The evolution of the stage and theatre as archetype, through temporary and permanent models of scenic arrangements and spaces of public display - will be widely studied through historic and contemporary precedents.  

Scenography will be studied as a paralell field of information – setting the stage inside out. The recurrance of plays, reinterpreted through significant yet ephemeral spatial arrangements and manipulations of stage sets - will be evaluated through degrees of temporality and permanence  forming a collective resource bank for our experimental approach to a new stage in the city.

Programming and analysis of needs will take place through close communication and collaboration with the Nationaltheateret.

The CITY
Located in the axis of the Parliament, framed by the Royal castle and University,  the National Theatre by architect Bull holds a strategic position of the representative layer in the city of Oslo. For its temporary relocation, Tøyen, Filipstad, Vulkan and Tullinløkka is proposed as alterative sites. An evaluation of these options ( and more) related to morphology and role in the city will be seen in a larger urban perspective, including options of transforming existing structures.  

On collectively selected sites, our final resolution will be on the level of a detailed architectural project with clear definitions of program, spatiality, materiality, and structure in a 1:200 / 1:100 drawingsset.

A model, a 1:500 siteplan and an axonometric section of the public interior will be key drawings.

The course outlines main tendencies in the history of architectural theory, moving backwards in time from the present to antiquity. It is organized as a lecture series with parallel mandatory reading seminar