Diplomprosjekt
Høst 2024
Institutt for arkitektur
This diploma works within the present condition of practicing architecture in a world of rapid change, a world that is starting to feel claustrophobic and apocalyptic, making it easy to feel lost and overwhelmed by the vastness of uncertainties we are confronted with everyday. While global challenges undeniably demand substantial solutions, the scope of things I, as one individual, can influence through architecture being small compared to the chaos of this world feels intimidating. This is why I see the need for a positive turn-around of the catastrophe-scenario that is usually portrayed, ways to approach the future with hope and believing in an imagination of a better world.
The work tries to answer how I can find hope and meaning through architecture in a world of chaos and uncertainties and how we can imagine a better future through an architecture of kindness. Something very deep, profound but also personal lies at the bottom of the answers to these questions. The world I imagine is filled with joy, happiness and kindness and I find the hope for this by being joyful, happy and kind through my work. Kind to myself and kind to others, whereby the use of the term ‘others’ will never exclude anything non-human, but rather include anything and everything I share the world with. The investigation of what a kind place is or can be and how the production of space and experience can be used to communicate happiness and joy manifests itself in a dialogue between me and my work using different methods, always accompanied by intuition. While the discoveries from the act of making continuously inform further development, things also take on a life of their own and the joy of the process lies within the trust that the answers I am seeking are already there, hiding behind the obscurity of finding the right questions to ask. Within this, a fundamental part of creating what is kind is the joy of the architectural process itself, the joy of making.
The project tells the story of imagining kind places in eight chapters: A Manifesto for Hope, The Atlas of Happiness, Translating kindness, The landscape I imagine, The scale of touch, A dialogue between me and my work, The production of joy and Epilogue. Each chapter discusses kindness through different media and scale. A 1:1 exploration was included in ‘The scale of touch’.
The project concludes in the introduction of three architectural projects (‘The production of joy’) on different sites in Oslo, each relating back to the exploratory process in their own way. ‘To catch the wind’ is a structure welcoming the wind bringing the cold from the North at the end of autumn, ‘To encounter presence’ is a reproduction of a personal experience in the form of an architecture encouraging the human-non-human encounter and ‘To make a place’ intervenes with the urban fabric by supporting and reacting to existing structures found on site. Each of the three projects produces kindness at different scales, from the meteorological to a subtle intervention in the urban fabric.
About catching the wind: “I have not found an answer to the question of where exactly the wind starts, but there comes a moment when the wind that travels from far away meets my structure, the moment it touches the fabric suspended from the arch. It is like the wind becomes visible, blowing through the arch that stands still and strong, waiting to catch and welcome the wind from the north to bring the cold.”
About encountering presence: “It fosters kindness by offering space for human-non-human encounters with the placement in an area rich in the presence of non-humans. Here, the non-human does not only include the living ecosystems but all elements of existence. The uncontrollable nature of these encounters contributes to the richness of the experience, affecting the energy of the place and creating moments of wonder and joy.”
About making a place: “It is an intervention so subtle that one might or might not notice while walking past. A quiet invitation to be and connect, sharing a moment of kindness resonating with the place or others present, human or non-human.
Everything I have experienced through this work has helped me realise my voice as part of an important discussion more present and louder than I could have imagined, in architecture and beyond. A discussion to which I want to contribute with this diploma, finding a way through the chaos with hope, because there is so much space to hope!
Lara Brenda Heidenreich / Lbrenda.heidenreich@gmail.com / +47 92347707
