2017 Vår

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.

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”.

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”.

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.