2018 Høst

Interaksjonsdesign 1 forbedrer studentenes ferdigheter innen interaksjonsdesign, med fokus på sentrale ferdigheter og materialer som brukes ved design av fysiske og digitale løsninger. Kurset omfavner og utforsker de kreative mulighetene som oppstår gjennom nyere utvikling innen fysisk databehandling, sensorteknologier og mobile enheter, til å se på hverdagslige fysiske objekter (utstyrt med brytere, sensorer og mikrokontrollere) som utvidede grensesnitt for styring av digitale opplevelser.

Kurset er i hovedsak praktisk orientert og starter med en workshopserie som tar for seg ulike fysiske interaksjonsteknologier og -tilnærminger som leder inn i større prosjekter. Studentene får mulighet til å arbeide med Arduino-mikrokontrollere, smarttelefoner, Processing-kode og et stort utvalg sensorer for prototyping og designtesting. I tillegg til de praktiske sidene ved kurset vil det bli holdt en rekke forelesninger/foredrag og workshops med utøvere og spesialister på feltet.

Kurset gir bred kunnskap om design- og kunsthistorie i relasjon til vår samtid. Grunnleggende spørsmål som hva design er og har vært, blir grundig drøftet. Emnet introduseres med en innføring i temaer innen kunst- og formgivningshistorien fra oldtiden frem til og med romantikken. Deretter flyttes fokus over til en gjennomgang av sentrale designhistoriske epoker, perspektiver, strømninger og episoder, fra Arts and Crafts-bevegelsen og fremveksten av moderne design på slutten av 1800-tallet til popdesign og postmodernisme på 1980- og 1990-tallet, fortsatt med et sideblikk til kunstens verden. Emnet avsluttes med en samtidshistorisk gjennomgang av designhistorisk utvikling fra tusenårsskiftet og frem til dags dato med fokus på media- og informasjonsrevolusjonen. Emnet vil gå grundig inn på temaer som rettferdig handel og bærekraftig design. Kurset tar ikke mål av seg til å være uttømmende, men det vil sette fokus på et sammensatt sett av estetiske, filosofiske, politiske motivasjoner som har formet design og kunst fra industrialismen til dag.

Form Studio: Modular Vernacular will produce new architectural forms for a historically sensitive setting. Design work will focus on the relationship between construction and context. The aim will be to propose new spatial models for the present-day inhabitation of a heritage site.

The studio will build on the long-term AA Visiting School project the Island Reader which has for the last four years developed alternative ways of investigating a place through collective analysis.  We will continue to work with measuring and observation as our first act but construction and materiality will be the focus in our design studio.  

The Coast

The studio will operate on the islands of Lyngør, off the south coast of Norway. Historically, the coastline of Norway has experienced a continuous influx of ideas from around the world as a result of its location within coastal trade networks. Architecturally, this has resulted in a diverse and fluid notion of style. This is in visible contrast to the settlements of the interior valleys, where local culture was preserved in more isolated communities. This dichotomy between the coast and the interior is fundamental to Norwegian cultural history and identity. The studio will travel between these different communities to study their variations in style and typology, abstracting our readings into new architectural forms.

Our aim is to instil a critical appreciation for the enduring benefits and limitations of vernacular construction beyond the pastiche. We will draw on the spatial and constructional characteristics of the vernacular, to determine the formal qualities that have evolved over time from the necessities of island life. By teasing these implicit characteristics, we will address a key question:

How ought architects design new forms within finite historic environments?

The Island

The studio will focus on Lyngør, where buildings have been frequently restyled to mimic continental trends. Throughout the history of the island, houses have been taken apart, reassembled, cannibalized and reformed into new iterations. Sailors brought home the world and remade their houses in its image. ´Southern Classical´ houses were hand-crafted objects, built from standardized and transportable modular elements. We will understand modular structural systems and standardization as fundamental to contemporary architecture. Notched logs, timber panels, and stone foundations were rational parameters that determined the plan. Buildings were designed alike in their construction logic, but with individual expression and variation apparent in their detail.

Lyngør is nestled across four islands, located near historic shipping lanes, where the North Sea meets the Baltic. The island community blossomed into a rich merchant village in the late eighteenth-century, with a burgeoning class of ship owners, sailors and boatbuilders. The main strait through the village was once the main highway around the coast of Norway, and much like the follies of Potemkin or the strip in Las Vegas, the houses turn their good side towards the water. Expensive paints and ornate windows winking flirtatiously at the boats passing by.

Failing to modernize with the arrival of the steam ships at the turn of the century, Lyngør remained preserved nineteenth-century village - at least on the surface. After a period of stagnation, the concept of modern leisure hit the island in the 1950’s. Often it was the decedents of the shipwrights that returned, with their cabin cruisers, sunbeds, and a thirst for the authentic. Buildings are markers of wealth, monuments to family history and symbols of cultural and financial capital. In Lyngør everyone owns the truth about what is authentic, and they are not afraid to tell you.

Many people will claim that it is logical for new buildings to mimic the prevalent classical style. Some call for UNESCO world heritage status, while others are concerned with the implications this could have for the local businesses. Like many other villages along the Norwegian coast, an upsurge in seasonal tourism has been accompanied by a decline in permanent residency. The closure of much of the basic infrastructure necessary to maintain a permanent community has seen tourism replace industry.

The local municipality will implement a temporary construction ban while a regulatory framework for the new development is established. The studio will regularly engage with the various stakeholders involved in this process throughout the semester.

The Building

To Read – to gather knowledge through surveying, recording and interpreting.

The Studio will actively collaborate with Utmark Architects from Bergen, a multidisciplinary practice of architects, digital surveyors, and construction managers (www.gamle3hus.no) The practice works between preservation and new built form. Workshops on land surveying, digital surveying and post processing of digital information will be held in Lyngør.

The studio does not consider research to be a separate exercise from propositional thinking, rather, it asserts that the act of surveying is propositional by nature and therefore inherent to design thinking. Readings will focus on architectonic thresholds, such as the relationships between foundations and topography, the domestic interior and the weathered exterior, traditional craft and contemporary construction. As part of the municipal framework, these readings will create a catalogue of built form in Lyngør.

To Build – to construct by assembling and joining parts or materials.

The current statutory regulations on the island limit the built footprint of a residential building to less than 200 square meters, while also regulating colour, material, and roof shape. The studio will question these parameters and test their limitations. Students will use their precedent studies to inform their proposals for new construction methods and future modes of inhabitation on the islands.

Projects will be developed through large-scale material models and architectural drawings. Learning from what has already been built on the islands, traditional craft will inform contemporary construction methods. Prefabrication, contemporary timber technology and digital fabrication will inform the design of modular details. For the last three years Kastler Skjeseth Architects have been building on the island. Students will frequently be exposed to a network of builders, artisans and construction sites in various stages.

The course is the last part of a trilogy of studios dealing with geographic tropes to link architecture and landscape architecture. After focusing in the objectification and representation of the tropical high Andean mountains (2015) and the design of orogenic objects in the Norwegian island (2016) we will venture once more into the high altitude tropical Andes. If the first two studios focused on the potentials of understanding geographic entities as primal architectural figures, this course will focus on the pre-conceived scale-less figures that better establish relations with a heavily modified ground. In other words, we will challenge site specificity in landscape architecture by projecting form in two divergent scales: A building large enough to behave as a garden, or, a landscape small enough to interact clearly with buildings. The course ideally has a balanced mix of architects and landscape architects.

Context and expedition:

Colombia ́s enduring war has reached a pivotal moment as the Oslo (and later Havana) peace dialogues mark a turning point for the mediation of land redistribution. Five million hectares of rural land will be redistributed in the next 20 years.

In this course we will work in two easily accessible sites in Colombia, exploring the notion of the Latifundio and Minifundio as foundational canons for land tenure structure. This dualistic tenure system typical of Latin America is characterized by relatively few large commercial estates known as latifundios, which are over 500 hectares, and numerous small properties known as minifundios, which are under 5 hectares.

Students will work in a latifundio located close to Bogota (500 hectar) and a minufundio (1 hectar) close to Medellin, both privately owned. The unique character of these two sites is that in both locations there is a possibility to engage with arts and craft as driving forces to open both sites to the public, as well as using arts as the motivator to think the post-conflict country´s future.

This structure of land tenure will provide us not only with a social context for our work, it will also allow us to test the capacity of certain forms to have effect at divergent scales under the same ownership structure.

To engage with questions of form and language, we will borrow from the Brazillian landscape designer Burle Marx' modernist abstract gardens and his negotiation of tropical nature. These gardens had the potential to objectify the ground without the need of walls, breaking with the longstanding paradigm of the walled garden as well as taking distance from land art.

Attention to form, language and the formalized ground, will, however, be coupled with an attention to ground materialities such as soil, sand, live matter on the one hand, and to the extended network of political, social and economic forces at play in Colombia’s rural territories on the other hand.  The aim is, in architectural and landscape architectural experiments to possibly effect land use policies and environmental regulations through beautiful interventions, and ultimately to activate the ground as a design medium with its own set of logics.

The course will work with a range of representation media; drawing, model making, photography and writing. Archival research will be reflected in short written texts, as will  ground conditions and agency.  

In the case of Bogota, we will work with a private land owner and his astonishing collection of abstract sculpture scattered across the estate.

In the case of the minifundio in Medellin, the land is used by an artist and ceramist producing in a region with a beautiful tradition of ceramic production.

If the large site is about art exhibitions in the open air, and its potentials to direct the master plan for a large farm, the second, much smaller plot, will offer the opportunity of designing a very precise intervention linking the life of the artist to the context of an art town. Both models of ownership are common while the current use is unique. We will investigate the potentials of arts and crafts beyond simple tourism.

The course will launch in Colombia on August 10th with a weeklong workshop on archival works. Our group will dig deep into the archives of the Colombian geographic institute as well as study some of the original works produced by naturists, cartographers, and artists to describe the high altitude Andes. 

Over this first week in Colombia, we will work together with architecture students from Universidad de Los Andes and other guest students that will take part in the open workshop. During the workshop, there will be a day of lectures by Colombian and Norwegian designers, as well as the launch of an exhibition by artists, architects and landscape architects working in the long-term research project between Colombian institutions and AHO. It is highly encouraged to join the trip to Colombia, but it is not mandatory due to ticket costs. It is recommended that the students arrive in Bogota on August 9.

The official field trip will end on August 18; the students are encouraged and allowed to stay one week more touring Colombia. The first day of classes in Oslo after the trip will be August 27.

In October we will do a second field trip to Madrid to do more archival work.

Preliminary schedule. 

August 9: Students arrive in Bogota, Colombia

August 10: Students and faculty meet for the launch of course and workshop together with Universidad de Los Andes.

August 10 – August 17: Official field trip in Colombia

August 27: The first day of classes after the field trip. 

October: Second field trip to Madrid. Archival work on the botanical expeditions to Nueva Granada.