This experimental preservation studio is about building components, materials and industrial products; their histories, cultural values, technological properties and spatial potential. The task is to investigate a number of existing buildings, using the conceptual framework of provenance to explore their reuse, transformation and preservation.

Normally, we valuate buildings as singular and confined entities, naming their architects, concepts, forms and functions, and securely fixing them in time and place. Their components (construction, materials, colors, products, technical systems i.a.) gain value by being parts of the whole, in place to support our conception of the work. Similarly, in historic preservation, valuable buildings are turned into monuments as wholes, leaving the components as servants to a grander idea.

This studio explores an alternative way of valuating and transforming buildings by taking their components as points of departure: where they are from, how they have been circulated, who their producers and distributers were, how they age and accumulate value over time, and how they can be recycled in new forms of architecture. The concept of provenance is normally used to document the chronological history of ownership, legitimacy, and display of artworks, manuscripts, and antiquities, but is also regularly employed in relationship to production of food, clothing, jewelry and building materials (fair trade, food miles, child-labor i.a.). To transpose this concept into architecture releases unexpected aspects of architecture traditionally not accounted for, like the histories of fluctuating ownership, dramatic events, political controversy, and social history. Triggering this potential might alter the way we reuse, transform and preserve our buildings.

Each student will be given one building as the focus of their research, and will through a number of assignments be asked to explore its future life. The students will write their own brief based on initial research and develop an architectural project through a self-chosen approach (speculative, fictional, realistic). Students are encouraged to take a critical stand towards the discipline of architecture and preservation and to develop new methods of working through an experimental practice involving archiving, survey procedures, writing, drawing, physical model building, computer modelling, representational techniques etc.

The studio is run as a collaboration with the architectural practice Rebuilding Arkitekter.

Teachers: Erik Langdalen, Alena Rieger, Juan Ruiz Anton, Wenche Andreassen

This is number four of a series of studios that focusses on post-war architecture (1.concrete, 2.systems, 3.prefab). The studio is part of the research project “Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the era of Circular Economy”, run by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen.