2019 Høst

The architectural/urban 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/ urban 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 and urban realms.

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. It derives from relations and interrelations between the built spaces. Its domain of presence spans over the experience of the sequence of movement through spaces of different architectural/ urban atmospheres, to leftover spaces or voids. Threshold is the vestibule of experience.

We have learned, through the demands of our contemporary societies, to obsessively or subconsciously seek for speed and efficiency. Our daily journeys between workspaces and homes are vestibules of mobility within which we barely even connect to our surrounding physical environment –being occupied with our abstracted virtual worlds. 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.

This course thinks of the architectural/ urban threshold not only as a space of transition but also as a metaphor to encapsulate the experience derived from an individual’s ensemble of thinking, feeling and bodily memory. It attempts to raise students’ awareness of thresholds through readings that successfully capture the significance of the notion of transition.

In the course we read, visualize, analyze and discuss eight texts consisting of exemplary written pieces from architecture, literature and even poetry. The architectural texts represent the threshold through descriptions on physical transitions in built spaces, while the literary texts portray mind spaces or images that define a threshold as a physical or mental transition of a state to another. The criteria for choosing the texts has been their successful writing style for conveying meanings, stimulating imagination, and communicating their intentions in a meticulous and coherent manner. The visual essays, analytical readings and critical discussions on the selected texts are structured in weekly sessions of the elective course. However, the final elective week focuses on writing an individual text assignment that describes the experience of a threshold. Optionally, the text assignment can incorporate one illustration, image, or collage as a representative visualization for the text.

In each weekly session, the students are supposed to take turns in presenting a visual essay for the assigned text. The appointed student must also try to take the lead in engaging the members of the course in follow-up reflections on the allocated text of the session. The first three days of the final elective course week is designated for students’ individual writing and is assisted and tutored by the course leader. The last two days of this week include feedbacks on the written individual texts, provided by a native English speaker guest-crit. The objective of the assignment is to improve the writing skills of the students in articulating a thought/ narrating a subjective experience in an evocative and yet plain manner.

Alternatively, the course has the potential to include an excursion in Oslo with specific focuses on experiencing an architectural/ urban threshold. The visit demands for short text assignments on narrating the experience with required specific focuses. In the followed-up session after the excursion, these short writing explorations will be examined and collectively evaluated for choosing the most successful narrations. In the case of including the excursion, which will be decided upon at the start of the course in a poll, the text readings will consist of six texts instead of eight.

The aim of the studio is to explore how to design a park structure - den grønne ringen (the green ring) - in connection to existing landscapes and programs in Hovinbyen, by combining a macro perspective on area development with a small scale design intervention.The purpose of the park is both to provide a space of recreation for the people living in the area, and to function as a mobility axis, connecting the different parts of Hovinbyen to the rest of the city.

Today, the area of Hovinbyen is characterized by its history as an industrial area, with infrastructure dominating the landscape. Over the last decade, the area has gone through a transformative development process, with thousands of new housing units coming to, and new inhabitants moving to the area to live and work. 

Still in its formative stage, the area faces several challenges and opportunities to define meaningful relationships to the surrounding areas and programs, and to establish its identity as a neighborhood in the greater city of Oslo. The green ring could potentially be a critical element in pursuing these opportunities and a tool in facing these challenges. 

The green ring aims to be both a mobility axis, a recreational park structure, an attractive destination for inhabitants across Oslo, and an ecosystem that successfully integrates with tangent biotopes. One focus of the studio work will be to explore how to design programs and systems that integrate human and non-human ecosystems. 

In 2015 a plan and idea competition for Hovinbyen was held to collect new suggestions and perspectives for how to develop the area. Today, there is an ongoing invite only competition focusing on the programming and identity of Hovinbyen. The students participating in the studio will have a real chance to influence this process by means of presenting work to both key governmental actors and firms participating in the competition. 

The recent interest in the ocean as a poetic and scientific space for inquiry, calls for an evaluation of how architects and landscape architects address this unfathomable space.

This course will propose landscapes and architectures for marine investigation. The project will be particularly informed by contemporary research techniques that involve the representation of the ocean as space and habitat. As an alternative to a centralized marine research space, this course will suggest a network of dispersed centers for marine investigation. Students will design a horizontal research space that unfolds as something between a garden and a building.

The course builds upon ongoing ocean initiatives in Norway. These include the prime minister’s panel on a sustainable ocean economy, an effort to engage the heads of coastal states throughout the world, and Rev Ocean - a new Norwegian research ship and a “world ocean headquarter”.

We will test the idea of a horizontal and landscape driven marine research facility that speaks to the geographical dispersal of marine research sites, and includes several locations along the Norwegian coast - allowing a network to build and form. The spaces will be located between land and sea, and be should be capable of recreating the different conditions of the fields of study in contemporary ocean research.

The course unfolds as an alternative approach to contemporary proposals for littoral design, which can be roughly described as follows: 

1. Designs inclined to aesthetically abuse or fetishize science or exploration, where form borrows from the studied matter
2. Proposals that borrow form from littoral vernacular architecture (prevalent in Scandinavia)
3. Design interventions that directly interpret ocean forms or adapt metaphors of fluidity into architecture

By using specific landscape media (the manipulation of the ground, live matter and time ) we will search for an alternative aesthetic for littoral design that is informed by science, yet free from maritime vernacular elements, all while remaining informed by the best examples of littoral architecture and landscape architecture around the world. The course work will be informed directly by the landscape practices of sea dwellers, from researchers to fishermen. 

We will be studying an array of littoral design cultures, with a particular focus on the Mediterranean and the influence of seafaring on Greek and Roman thought. Sailor, geographer and historian Pascal Arnaud will be a guest in the studio. 

Furthermore, we will be looking at links between representation, navigation and littoral architecture in the history of Arctic seafaring, industries, and cultures, and compare these traditions with the ones that originated in the Mediterranean. We are interested in the long-standing fascination of architects and landscape architects with the spatial metaphors of the ocean, from the isotropic condition of the sea to the island as a spatial metaphor, to the boat as preeminent heterotopia. 

Landscape Architects and Architects are encouraged to work together; however, it will also be possible to do individual projects that are either buildings or open-air landscapes. The primary challenge will be to test how the program of the research center can adapt to open-air conditions, and the littoral zone specifically.

As in previous courses, this experiment is driven by the ambition of testing the elastic limits of the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture through the study of shared geographic tropes.

Typology is the very embodiment of conceptual thinking: it isolates similarities from the flux of reality in order to make purified clusters of these similarities suitable for manipulation. The natural home of a type is the taxonomy...it is not obvious how to establish the criteria with regard to a ‘type’ for dwelling – according to individual ergonomics, to bed and table, to the middle-class flat or house, to ‘functions’ or decorum, to the market, to a building or urban block or city or region, to the primordial conditions of nature, to culture? Dwelling, properly understood, is more profound than the efficient or attractive accommodation of a life-style – it comprises orientation in reality.

Peter Carl. Type, Field, Culture Praxis

Introduction

We all, I think, instinctively feel, and rationally assume, that buildings last for generations. We build them of concrete; liquid stone set around steel. It is hard to imagine a more irreversible concoction. Into these concrete cages we set our most treasured stories. Stories about work, education, health, wealth and family. But stories are liquid, they move much more rapidly than these fixed frames can bear. We have forgotten, in how we build, that what is given now was almost unthinkable a century ago.

In previous eras, the façade of a building, its public gestures and spaces, where the lasting elements. From palaces to factories, simple frames were adorned in rich material compositions, allowed to become recognisable and enduring characters by having the flexibility to change inside.

Now a drastic turnaround has taken place in the approach to our cities. The façades have become novel and sacrificial surfaces and the interiors tightly packed with fixed ideas. The results of this inversion are all around us. Demolition is a daily occurrence in the city, with the average lifespan of an urban building now in the order of 30 years. Every layer of our buildings is infected with contradictions of obsolescence and permanence.

This is the very definition of an unsustainable practice. Extraction of raw materials from the earth has tripled since the 70’s and is responsible for 50% of carbon emissions and 80% of biodiversity loss. Concrete has become the most consumed substance on the planet second only to water.

The Project

This autumn we will develop positions in relation to urban buildings, their life, their death and their composition. We will consider the relationship between location and life span, façade and structure, between use and appearance, between construction, materials, resources and environment, and we will develop a critical perspective in relation to how, where and when one should build.

Urban Research

The site of our project will be Oslo, we will start at the urban scale working as a group to understand the development of the city historically and the successes and failures that are present for us to read and learn from. This historical research will be supported by city walks, seminars and discussions with urban planners and architects about new strategies being developed for the city. We will work with researchers from NMBU who are making urban planning projections through the lens of degrowth and green growth strategies, and we will meet with Assemble who are developing a cultural masterplan for Hovinbyen. Through drawing and photography, we will build a collection of observations about the city and its buildings that we will take through into our final building proposals.  

Typological Development

Building on the foundation of understanding that we develop through investigations at the urban scale we will then develop new taxonomies for the city that respond directly to the present challenges of density,  durability and flexibility.  A key touch stone for this work will be a 17th century publication by French architect Pierre Le Muet. His book, The Way of Building Fairly for All People (Manière de bastir, pour touttes sortes de personnes) was published as a pattern book for Paris and contributed to the rise of neoclassicism in Britain and France. Tracing the rise of neoclassicism northward, we will consider the influences of German neoclassicism on the city of Oslo by travelling to Berlin.

Building Project

The final project will be a detailed building proposal situated within the urban plan and taxonomy we have created. We will focus here on timber construction working to break free from aesthetic and performative assumptions about the material and developing compositional approaches that allow for the thickness, depth and weight we find in the neoclassical city to be transposed into our propositions for new city buildings.