2024 Høst

Teacher team:

- Tine Hegli
- Andrea Pinochet
- Lina Broström
- Arnkell Petersen

The Circular Prototyping studio offers students a comprehensive understanding of architecture within the context of environmental sustainability. This semester the studio will examine surplus masses along with other earth and bio-based materials, and their potential use in the Nordic context. In particular, the studio will be concerned with the design of a prototypical building that could be prefabricated or mass-produced, quickly, and easily with surplus masses.

Surplus masses: From waste to resource

Surplus masses are the unused excavated masses, or material, that comes out of a construction site. The studio will interrogate how we can test and give agency of these excavated masses that are often regarded as waste in the building industry. What opportunities can new technology give us when working with them? 

Clay-rich soil is often considered a waste product in a contemporary excavation site —In 2021 alone, 12 million tons of earth masses were removed from building sites, often ending up in the landfills. Clay is present in various forms in large areas of the country and has been used as a building material for centuries. In Norway, for instance, we find many fine examples of earth buildings more than a century old. However, clay is not always well regarded by builders, in part because there are few building standards or products readily available in the local industry; and in part because the knowledge and craft of how to use clay has been lost over time. How can local history and informal knowledge prove relevant to confront today’s imminent ecological challenges? Can a renewed understanding of materials offer new opportunities for architecture? 

Upscaling 

Through an in-depth study of these materials, we will gain a deeper understanding of how we can reframe our relationship with material extraction, shifting the balance in the building industry towards design choices that are more inclusive of earth and bio-based materials. We will also address issues relating to labor, building ethics and environmental politics. And we will discuss our role as architects in developing this new-old industry, with agency to instrumentalize traditional ecological knowledge and change the current building culture.

The studio will be part of a collaboration with Asplan Viak, Henning Larsen and other industry representatives.

Description of the studio series

The curriculum centers on the principles of circular building practices, with a specific focus on building materials and construction techniques that substantially mitigate environmental impact. These principles are investigated within a design-studio format, equipping students with vital tools to guide form-finding processes and facilitate critical evaluation of sustainability measures as an integral part of the design process. The design explorations also include climate adaptation as consideration of local weather and climate conditions, spanning the historical context, present circumstances, and future climate scenarios. These projections, in parallel with strategies to reduce negative impact, establish a meaningful link between present design choices and their alignment with the long-term UN Sustainability Goals (SDGs).

An essential aspect of the curriculum involves introducing students to the application of lifecycle methodology and environmental assessment (LCA) as a decision-making tool. LCA enables students to analyze the environmental impacts associated with linear versus circular practices, fossil versus renewable resources, and provides insight into policy considerations to facilitate sustainable outcomes.

The studio´s core activities revolve around design projects that mirror architectural practice. The hands-on experience with prototyping allows students to apply theoretical knowledge in a practical manner and foster a deeper understanding of possibilities and challenges at hand as we move forward into a future with circular economy and ecological awareness. Each studio semester focuses on in-depth investigations of different materials or components in relation to their environmental potential.

The studio course series investigates how climate change and its many connected crises will demand radically different futures, and how these will require an equally radical restructuring of our societies and not least our professions. Climate change is the greatest threat humanity is facing. Yet, other crises like wars, repression, political instability, and growing economic disparities are often given priority. But these crises are not separate. At their core they all connect to how we distribute and consume resources and how our societies are currently locked into extractive growth models, overshadowing environmental and social concerns. The course explores transitional strategies such as degrowth as solutions, challenging the narrative that such approaches would lead to societal collapse.

Each year, this studio course series engages students in using interdisciplinary approaches to provide strategies and designing concrete interventions for post-growth development. The studio works across diverse contexts, from the Nordic to the global, each with its unique set of challenges.

This semester, we will be envisioning a climate altered post-growth future in Ukraine, in collaboration with the Kharkiv School of Architecture, focusing on Lviv and the Levandivka, Pryvokzalna, and Klepariv districts. With the ongoing war, Ukraine is faced most acutely with humanitarian suffering and destruction of built and natural environments. Through the lens of post-growth, you will investigate whether the devastation of the war can be used as a starting point to foster a transition society, critically reassessing the way we build communities, how we live in them, use environments, and interact with landscapes. Levandivka, Pryvokzalna, and Klepariv are characterised by housing, as well as disbanded railway infrastructure and production plants. In an uncertain future, localised production and distribution can help foster resilience. But this needs to happen in ways that build on climactic, ecological, and social stability.

Climate change requires that we take our skills beyond business-as-usual models, reclaiming the future through new ways of living on a damaged planet. What can we bring with us into the future in terms of spatial practices, cultural heritage, social norms, and structures, what will be left behind, what will have to be different, and how will it all need to be reassembled? Through your education at AHO you are trained to envision things that are not yet. You are trained to be expert storytellers, dreaming up bold new possibilities, providing hope within an increasingly limited future. We will explore spatial strategies to foster a transitional society and visualise what these may look like. Can radical realities be envisioned that are acceptable to people who are concerned with immediate needs? What options do we have when we must respond to inevitable climate change? Despite slow action, there is agreement in government, municipal, and private sectors that climate change and its complexity demand increased climate preparedness and more interdisciplinary solutions. This means that we need to work together across fields and geographies through strategic processes to suggest real life interventions that matter. This course will provide you with concrete tools, ways of thinking, and deliverables to take on such tasks.

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 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 prearchitectural 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.

2023 marked the start of the second cycle of the B&SM course series - structured into spring and autumn modules:

• The spring semesters - a series of courses on Acting and The Collective in a More-Than-Human World - are dedicated to the topic on 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 autumn semesters - a series of courses on Acting and The Acted in a More-Than-Human World - investigate actual Ecoperformance in Architecture studied and worked through a discursive design practice that seeks to establish porous architectural infrastructures which understand environment and body as inseparable dimensions of performative creation

 The fall 2024 semester works on Ecoperformance in Architecture through a focus set on Vessels & Crafts:

Ecoperformance understands environment and body as inseparable dimensions of performative creation. In an ecoperformance, the environment constitutes a living and interactive play of presences and forces. The performer is not the central agent, but one of the play’s components. At the same time as an ecoperformance experiments with environmental interactions as a performative event, it configures itself an environmental process. Ecoperformance can take place in any landscape, natural or urban, and may, among other possibilities, question, honor and reaffirm human being/environment interconnections. It may serve to raise the awareness of the harmful environmental impact of human actions, and, eventually, become a vehicle of political denunciation.

What is Ecoperformance? – retrieved from https://www.ecoperformance.art.br/about-ecoperformance

This semester, the Transformation in Practice Studio will focus on the densification of small cities by proposing an apartment block for a historic centre in rural Norway.

Different from European cities, small town centres in rural Norway lack the long urban tradition found on the continent. Often related to the emergence of industry or proximity to waterways, small towns appear as stations along the railway, at the intersection between highways, or nodes between trading routes. Towns frequently grew around clusters of farms in advantageous locations, which are now embedded into the urban fabric like relics of the past. Large farms took on the role of uniform and well-established town centres in Europe, where the type and expression often seamlessly incorporate new developments through strict control.

On the other hand, Norway looks more like the Wild West, a free-for-all version of the US, defined by sprawl, sudden densification, and a variety of facade expressions. Through the advent of industry in the 19th century, these town centres developed rapidly and with little planning. In postwar Norway, increased wealth further accelerated this expansion, and the few pockets of urban fabric established as a homogenous type in the late 19th century or early 20th century were often partly demolished and replaced by modernist structures. Combined with car-based town planning, the market-liberalist and developer-led policies of the last 40 years has led to places that struggle with fragmented scales of buildings and undefined urban spaces. The architecture is a hotchpotch mix. At best, there is a richness in its diversity, but too often, it is defined by low cost and poor-quality housing.

These developments starkly contrast sustainability strategies for increasing density by adding residential units within already built-up areas to diminish the need for cars, reduce CO2 emissions, and protect green spaces in urban environments. Current governmental planning policies advocate for the so-called knutepunktfortetting to breathe life into small-town city centres for greener and more sustainable living. The aim is to make efficient urban knots that bind together commercial infrastructure and housing with short distances between daily functions and synergies that reduce carbon footprint. Meanwhile, in the familiar terms of planning regulations, buildings should be 'in keeping'. Pitched roofs, dormer windows, and variations in the façade are prescribed qualities that, once scaled up, will test the line between fitting in and standing out. Traditional timber town city centres were dominated by domestic types adapted to become commercial buildings, leaving few precedents for the scale of construction needed.

The question of scale and translation is central. It often needs to be clarified whether a small town can absorb a big building, and if so, what characteristics it should take on. Nevertheless, there is precedence for large timber buildings in Norway, and the resurgence of timber as a sustainable construction material makes them pertinent case studies to revisit. At the end of the 19th century, trade centres like Arendal were small cities that required functions that greatly exceeded the construction possibilities of a single log. Local architects pushed the technology of the notched log and designed timber megastructures. The scale of these buildings prompted translations of buildings on the continent. Sand mixed with paint translated timber into stone. With little precedent locally, new building types that now seem perfectly integrated into the city were designed. We will again have to break new ground in places like this, and precedent must be found far and near.

Working within this context, the studio will ask the following questions:

What does it mean to design contextually in our times?

How do we design urban scale housing in a historical and non-urban context?

The output of the studio will consist of well resolved projects with distinctive formal qualities built on clear intentions. In groups students will be assigned a site in a historic town centre within a radius of 150 km of Oslo. The sites will be assigned according to certain common parameters of size, history, type of urban fabric and zoning plans that advocate further densification. The students will visit local planning offices, understand the development plans, and design a residential building within that plan. Depending on the site, projects will engage with the transformation, connection and extension of existing buildings, as well the design of autonomous new additions. Ideally, projects will include a mix of apartments and commercial spaces.

Through sampling existing qualities in the built environment, the proposals should aim to have an expression that speaks to and with the place without falling for the pastiche or romantism. The translation of material and form transcends the classifications of new and old, modern, and traditional. Plurality in building and the metamorphosis of one material into another is almost as old as construction itself.

The relationship between façade and plan will be essential. The conflict between cost, contemporary technical requirements and traditional features will be explored. Sustainable construction will be key, from the reuse of existing structures to the use of contemporary timber technology. Just like older buildings cannibalized their own through the reuse of elements and parts, the proposals will actively work with the repurposing of recycled elements.