2023 Vår

Body and Space Morphologies (B&SM) is a research-based teaching program in the Building Art department. Dedicated to Phenomenology in Architecture, the program offers Trans-Disciplinary master studios in explorative – architectural, pre-architectural and post-architectural - making, sensing and thinking.

We aim at preparing and enabling students to conduct their own interest driven investigation into Architectural Phenomenology - understood as a Research Creation; a working mode creating an inspired, process focused and reflective Material Practice. We consider this to be the Artistic Parallel to both Traditional Scholarly Research and Common Architectural Design Practice.

Based on performativity and affordance theories, performance and performance studies, disability and neurodiversity studies as well as phenomenology and perception theories, the B&SM Studio Works investigate primal and/or pre-architectural material/processes/phenomena/conditions and develop or perform a series of experienced distinct objects that behave relational, that inspire imagination, that provide new knowledge, strong architectural interests and/or architectural narratives or identities.

Spring 2023 marks the start of the second cycle of the B&SM course series on Acting and The Acted in a More-Than-Human World. The overall topic will be Animism in Architecture - studied and worked through a discourse on the various ideas, movements and awareness created in current ecoperformance, ecopoetic, ethnopoetic and ethnofiction works.

The semester task:

• spatially to release your necessity to make something because of something else;
• to act, react or enact on a distinct, personal initiative understood as necessity;
• to acknowledge, accept and further act on impulse / any impulse;
• to not know a thing, but wanting to get to know it;
• to construct and perform identities in the things rather than in thought;
• to embrace performativity as the sole act that sets and consummates your working stage and before any pre-conceived architecture;
• to finally reflect on how your working stage or architectural awareness acts, who it is that is acted, and where in this act or acting a collective can be found;
• to bring your work out and to give it a third-party readability in a final exhibition, a book and/or a film.

Description of the studio series

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.

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 proponents of change: Climate, Materials and Behavior, the studio seeks to engender future scenario thinking as multidimensional context to decode, integrate and react upon.

Description of studio assignments

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. The main theme spring 2023 is circular design practice; reducing the environmental footprint from building materials seen in a lifecycle perspective. The material in focus; up-cycled plastics from marine industry.

The final architectural result will be a built pavilion, floating on the water by Langkaia in Bjørvika, Oslo, designed and constructed by the studio students, teachers and collaborative partners.

The pavilion will host activities revolving around the environmental collective Nordic Ocean Watch (NOW), an organization working with public outreach to increase society’s knowledge and efforts on marine plastic waste. NOW facilitate for groups and school classes to come and participate in plastic waste sorting, as well as letting the general public have access outside of manned hours.

The project is funded by Oslo Municipality, Bymiljøetaten (BYM) and is a forerunner for a larger permanent knowledge hub in Lohavn. Communication regarding environmental challenges and societal and technical solutions to marine ocean waste will extend to become part of the architectural design itself, including studies of material properties and environmental impacts, reversible construction principals and passive climatization strategies.

The studio will collaborate with Institute of design (GK4/Stein Killi) on the actual prototyping of plastic building elements and have involved several industrial partners to participate in the process with the aim to give AHO a role as a laboratory; a testbed for architectural explorations that can further inform our industry. NOW is involved in a network of organizations with similar initiatives both nationally and internationally, and has the ambition is to establish knowledge hubs in several locations along the Nordic coastlines. 

This is the first in a series of master seminars that looks at the history of building elements and architectural motifs. The first seminar (spring 2023) is dedicated to the ceiling. Ceilings are eminent examples of how architectural motifs persist through different materials and techniques, times and places. Looking particularly at the coffered ceiling and its reinterpretations from antiquity to the present, we study the technical, tectonic, material, and iconographic translations of the coffer and other ceiling motifs through architectural history.

The seminar consists of lectures, reading seminars and field trips, ending in an exhibition at the end of the semester.

The Oslo School of Architecture is recognized for instigating and safeguarding a particular sensitivity to landscape. Originally as a unique and enduring way to engage with architecture, and more recently, as a sensitivity that evolved into a landscape architecture program. 

When we discuss landscape as a medium for design at the school, what kind of print visual material and references do we often use? What do we own in the library and our archives that contribute to making our school special regarding the intimate relationship between architecture and landscape? Is it possible to discuss this unique aspect of the school just by judging what we own in the library?