2022 Høst

This course is founded in an idea of circular resource networks and their role in future place-based practices. It builds knowledge on local landscape practices and local biodiversity and explores the friction zones between lived practice and heritage strategies.

Based in contemporary theory the course discusses ways of ‘making’ landscape and how they may be ‘unmade’ both by climate change and preservation practices.

Leaning on the cross-institute research project Common Resources-Strategies for a circular, balanced and shared management of areas under pressure, this course locates, analyzes and describes landscape resources in the Varanger territory.

Aim is to make a comprehensive archive of local biodiversity and landscape practices, and to map a piece of post-Artic territory that is facing rapid changes. Known landscapes types are beach sand dune areas, thawing permafrost landscape, grazing landscapes, national parkland, peatland and arable soil.

In a time when existing monuments and buildings are in the line of fire, on one hand demanded demolished and on another asked to be preserved, there is a pressing need to discuss the premises upon which our disciplines operate. We know that we have to reorient towards the reuse of what already exist, we need to rethink our methods, working techniques and terminology, and we need to raise the question of how we evaluate our cultural heritage. This elective course aims to interrogate the theoretical and conceptual frameworks used (historically and contemporarily) to approach the preservation and reuse of objects, buildings, cities, and landscapes.

Different categories of value permeate our culture, and are prescriptive for the ways in which society perceives its material framework. A heritage object’s importance, worth, or usefulness is subject to fluctuating opinions and practices, as is its mere status as a ‘preservation-worthy’ object. But what, exactly, are the values that prompt the preservation of a monument, regulate its reuse, and allows for its continued existence? Where are these values grounded, and by whom are they defined? How do we value and sustain the integrity of what is already there in ways that allow for imaginative reuse?

Value is an abstract term with a myriad of denominations. This seminar examines the multiple aspects of “value” that each, in its way, condition the preservation, use, longevity and estimation of monuments and material heritage. 

The seminar is part of the research project "Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity"

Summary:

The Climate Form studio aims to equip the student with a knowledge platform where architecture is examined within a context of environmental sustainability. The studio curriculum and associated assignments will revolve around strategies for climate change mitigation and climate change adaptation and actively seek to integrate the understanding of these in form-finding processes and critical evaluation. Through studies of local climate and building traditions at present, and parallel investigations on future scenarios - both in accordance with central UN sustainability goals (SDGs) and more conservative estimates (projections with less climate mitigation than what is anticipated in the Paris Agreement), the course activities seeks to inform and discuss adequate design response. The final result of the course is an architectural project presented with drawings, models and visuals accopagnied with in-depth analysis of the final design focusing on a climate mitigation strategy introduced in introductory sub-assigments.

Background:

Humankind has a distinct relationship with environment spanning millennia intrinsically forming human interaction with nature from provision to creation to destination. Architecture’s foundation as a human centric discipline is required to respond relatively to environments not only as a specific adaption, but also relatively to its own agency in influencing those environments on many scales.

Deep knowledge of effects upon climate and ecology as a result of the practice of construction and the procurement of materials that forms and reshapes our physical environment is overdue as a fundamental driver for design in the Anthropocene. Resultant change in the prerequisites for design have duly created a demand for distinct changes in formal expression, a revivification of the architectural language of climate-adaptive existence. Examined through three distinct proponents of change; climate adaption, climate mitigation and user behaviour.

The studio’s approach method is projective prototyping – examining typology, function, materiality and form as a result of contemporary understanding of climate change implications both regionally and globally. This accompanied by a narrative of projection that should inform design work and results, generating a coherent thread from conceptualization through iterative ideation to detail.

Task description:

The studio’s main assignment autumn 2022 is to design an accommodationfacility for the tourism industry now entering Finnmark and Varanger. This region seeks to attract new users and industries to dam up for ongoing depopulation, simultaneously the region experiences rapid changes in local climate and weather due to expedited climate change in the Arctic. This again demands urgent attention to the management of areas to foreseewhere to develop land and to which use. A tourism industry wanting to establish buildings and infrastructure close to the shoreline will have to build to withstand radically different conditions than what are observed on site today, requiring a long-term perspective in the planning and development of potential facilities. Setting the scene in 2100 will require students to create design concepts as adaptable to projected changes, while knowledge on mitigation strategies and post-carbon economies will initiate a new take on both user behaviour and needs, material palettes and consequently form.

The studio will work with the transformation of Centralteateret in the centre of Oslo. The theatre is a cultural building of complex provenance, making it an ideal case study for working with existing buildings. The first iteration of Centralteateret dates back to the late 18th century, and the theatre has since gone through several transformations. Unique to Centralteateret, these layers are still visibly intact to reveal the rich history embedded in the building's fabric. The different areas share a near undisturbed patina. These qualities should be cultivated rather than sanitised in future scenarios.

A theatre is a machine for illusion and storytelling, where the architecture is working hard to signify and symbolise, flatter, and seduce. The studio will study these aspects of the building to look for ways to improve the existing condition. The studio will propose projects transforming the theatre through a surgical analysis of the many spaces and components of the building. The studio's output will be a series of interventions, provocations and extensions that balance the need to preserve the existing condition with the building's potential for future use.

The studio will be organised into three parts:

Survey: The studio will lend considerable attention to understanding the building through on site investigations to study the interwoven layers of theatrical architecture from different historical periods. Surveys will quantify physical properties and the qualified values such as significance, symbolism, and tradition. Recordings will document the intersection between historical periods to understand the evolution of architectural thinking about a particular typology.

Artefact: The survey will be the foundation for the artefact, a large-scale material model that starts the inverted design process from fragment to building. The model is a physical and material manifestation of an essential component or junction found in your survey, translated into a three-dimensional piece at a detailed scale. This 'hot-spot' is a free-standing bricolage of materials that suggests something more than the sum of its parts. The original is not a prescriptive tool but the starting point for new designs and the representation of new artefacts.

Proposal: Students will work iteratively to find an appropriate and feasible way of constructing an architectural project that has contemporary relevance and engages with the existing building. Building on close observations of the context, students will develop their own architectural and technical agenda (an architectural intervention, a strategy for maintenance, a performance or a methodology to improve the use of the building based on an understanding of current challenges).

Projects will answer to the specifics of the building whilst being relevant to the broader discourse on the future of this type of building. The architectural proposal will be developed through large-scale material models, both analogue and digital, and architectural drawings. Craft will inform contemporary construction methods and material exploration by learning from what has already been built.