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  AaltoSiilo, Oulu

  Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen are giving the double keynote lecture “Values: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity” at the three-days European Commission Visit in Oulu, Finland, part of the EU program Living Spaces – Cities and regions shaping the built environment for everyone, followed by the Aaltosiilo Festival 2024: “The Post-Industral Dance”, on Saturday September 15.

  Center stage is the silo building designed by Alvar and Aino Aalto, and completed in 1931. In 2020, Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Preservation bought the obsolete, iconic concrete wood chip silo. The AaltoSiilo is presently being restored and reinvented by Skene Catling de la Pena Studio for a post-industrial era, redefining materiality for the 21st century and the role of industrial heritage in memory, shaping place and cultural identity.

  Conference

  Sep 11—14, 2024
  Read more about AaltoSiilo, Oulu

• 

  Former US Embassy wins Docomomo 2024 Modernism in America Award of Excellence

  A Civic/Institutional Design Award of Excellence is given for the restoration and adaptive reuse of the former U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway. This 1959 chancery, designed by Eero Saarinen, is a significant example of postwar Modernist architecture, embodying American values during the Cold War. Saarinen's striking design, particularly the precast concrete facades, was a technological first for Norway. Over decades, the façades had faded and deteriorated. The preservation team treated damaged areas, and the entire surface was buffed by hand, restoring the original sheen. An underground extension and a discreet rooftop addition were added to meet current needs without altering the building’s external appearance. Landmarked interiors, including the atrium and ambassador's office, were restored with sustainable materials while retaining character defining features. The U.S. State Department has been decommissioning and selling off its Modernist embassies, and many are being demolished, gutted or altered beyond recognition. Docomomo US has long advocated for preservation of these buildings, many of which are highly significant. This project is a rare example of an entire embassy building being saved and carefully restored.

  Team: Atelier Oslo and Lundhagem (Lead Architects); Erik Langdalen Arkitektkontor and Otero-Pailos Studio (Preservation Architects); LCLA Office and SLA (Landscape Architects); Paulsen & Nilsen (Interior Designers); Bollinger & Grohmann (Engineers)

  Photo: Einar Aslaksen

  Award

  Sep 10, 2024
  Read more about Former US Embassy wins Docomomo 2024 Modernism in America Award of Excellence

• Re-Store: Høvikodden. The Provenance of an Art Centre

  This seminar explores the full material provenance of the Henie Onstad Art Centre (HOK), located at Høvikodden in Bærum, including building materials, technical infrastructure, furniture, display systems, lighting, maintenance systems, as well as the thousands of art works that has been on display across the decades. By thorough investigations of the archives at HOK and at other locations, and through on-site surveys of the building, the students will excavate the sourcing, ownership history, production history, economy, usage and alteration records of the components, materials and artworks. By constructing an alternative history of the building,this seminar challenges the way we understand and value-assess buildings, and might change the way we transform them for the future. In addition, the seminar aims to provide scenarios for HOKs future development.

  Henie Onstad Art Centre was inaugurated in 1968 and designed by the young architects Jon Eikvar and Svein-Erik Engebretsen. It was radical of its time, both in terms of its curatorial ideas and its innovative architecture. Initiated and funded by the figure skater and Hollywood movie star Sonia Henie and her husband, the shipowner Niels Onstad, HOK represented a state-of-the-art cultural institution much inspired by Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art outside of Copenhagen. Based on the personal relationships of HOK’s director Ole Henrik Moe with people like Pontus Hultén, Willem Sandberg and Knut W. Jensen, the new center aimed for a new definition of art, showcasing contemporary music, dance, performance, film and photography alongside paintings, drawings and sculpture, engaging its visitors in new ways. Eikvar and Engebretsen, recent graduates from Statens Arkitektkurs at Statens Håndverk- og Kunstindustriskole (later Oslo School of Architecture) and employees at Nils Holter’s studio, won the competition in 1965 with an innovative scheme influenced by ideas that was circulating at the time. The project development and the building process progressed in line with the radical museum concept, including experimentation with new materials, 1:1 mock-ups, «electronic» site-management and more. Since 1968, the building had been expanded, altered and restored several times, and the art center has gained reputation as one of the leading art institutions in Scandinavia.

  Course

  Fall 2024
  Read more about Re-Store: Høvikodden. The Provenance of an Art Centre

• Re-Store: Weather

  This studio was dedicated to weather in all its forms and meanings, as well as its implications for the construction, care and understanding of
  architecture.

  Weather constantly dominates news headlines around the world, with reports on floods, rain storms, droughts, landslides, wildfires, blizzards and tornados giving proof of accelerating humaninduced global warming. Architecture is all about weather, providing shelter against the violent forces of nature, spurring creative acts of construction and maintenance. Weather is constructing building codes and regulations, turning architecture into a complex set of material composites and maintenanceschedules. Weather is both science and poetry, chronicled
  through time as surveys and statistics, but also in the form of painting, literature, sculpture, film and photography. Weather is at the center of preservation, activating core questions of the discipline, relating to patina, authenticity, originality, authorship and more. The studio asked for speculative explorations of weather as a broad cultural phenomenon, as well as specific architectural propositions on how to deal with weather in the reuse, transformation and preservation of architecture.

  Course

  Spring 2024
  Read more about Re-Store: Weather

• 

  Petroarkitektur

  Av Erik Langdalen, Kim Pløhn og Nicholas Coates

  Hvordan forholder vi oss som samfunn til paradoksene som møter oss når vi skal gjøre opp regnskapet etter «oljealderen», en paradigmatisk periode i norsk historie som ble innledet med det gigantiske Ekofisk-funnet oktober 1969 og som av klimahensyn må avrundes om ikke mange år. Kan oljens kulturminner innlemmes i norsk kulturarv når vi vet hvor ødeleggende denne virksomheten er for klodens klima? Hvordan måler vi oljeindustriens kulturminneverdi, en virksomhet så altomgripende, uhåndgripelig og paradoksal at den utfordrer de fleste kriterier og konvensjoner som kulturminneforvaltningen styres etter? Hvordan kan vi holde fast i noe som er dømt til å forsvinne på grunn av enorme vedlikeholdsutgifter, forurensningsfare og strenge krav om resirkulering? Og hvordan avdekke, forvalte og viderefortolke denne historien uten å bli offer for industriens selvforståelse og forenklede fortellinger om «oljeeventyret». Paradoksene dannet bakteppet for et masterkurs i sirkulærarkitektur ved Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i Oslo (AHO) våren 2023 der fire lærere og atten studenter forsøkte å formulere og svare på noen av spørsmålene knyttet til oljeindustriens etterliv. Denne teksten presenterer studentens arkitekturprosjekter og formidler noen av de diskusjonene som dukket opp underveis.

  Article

  Published Aug 3, 2023
  Read more about Petroarkitektur

• Re-Store: Petroleum

  The Re-Store Petroleum studio course built upon the assumption that Norwegian petroleum production will be phased out in the near future. This gigantic industry will leave behind an enormous amount of structures,
  counting offshore installations like oil-rigs, housing-rigs, sub-sea installations, infrastructure and petroleum products, as well as land-based building structures, urban areas and industrial landscapes. The studio aimed to answer how we can reuse these remains in a meaningful way, how we determine their heritage value, and how they can form the basis for new forms of architecture. Being the main factor for national wealth and a monument of the 20th century, carrying both symbolic and social value, this industry deserves meaningful memorials.

  The students were given existing structures as points of departure and asked to map the many different types and conditions, they were doing research on their material histories, qualities, values and potential for reuse, and developed architectural projects based on the findings. Petroleum and its many bi-products were examined as potential material for new forms.

  Course

  Fall 2023
  Read more about Re-Store: Petroleum

• 

  The story of how visionary architectural ideas found their way to Høvikodden

  From the book: Sonie Henie, henne form, Henie Onstad Art Centre 2021. Editor: Gunhild Varvin

  In the Norwegian context, the radical project that arose at Høvikodden in 1968, initiated and financed by Sonja Henie and Niels Onstad, was a completely new type of art institution. Moderna Museet, under the innovative directorship of Pontus Hultén, Louisiana Kunstmuseum and its owner-director Knut W. Jensen, and Stedelijk museum under the influential Willem Sandberg were all role models for a new kind of institution that Henie Onstad’s director, Ole-Henrik Moe, chose to call “det totale museum”.

  The architecture of the art centre, which was conceived by the young architects Jon Eikvar (1933–) and Svein-Erik Engebretsen (1933–), inscribed itself into the artistic project through an open relationship with its surroundings, a flexible spatial organisation, an unconventional form and innovative material experiments. The curatorial and museological precursors to the Høvikodden art centre are well known and thoroughly documented, but its architectural ancestry have been explored to a much lesser degree.[ii] Uncovering the ideas that formed the basis for the architects’ submission to the design competition requires a deep dig into the archives, and identifying the origins of the art centre’s architecture requires knowledge about the international discourse that unfolded within architecture towards the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s.

  Article

  Published Aug 1, 2021
  Read more about The story of how visionary architectural ideas found their way to Høvikodden

• 

  Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives

  Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece in postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition in 1958 and the building was inaugurated in 1962. Through six decades the beloved structure has been mired in phenomenology, poetry, and the personal memory of the select. Looking at the archives, a very different story emerges.

  In minute detail, this book presents the history of the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion; spanning from the geopolitical context in an increasingly tense cold war atmosphere, to the aggregates in the concrete of the audacious roof construction, and to the iconic trees, many of which died already before the second exhibition in 1964.

  Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives documents the vast cast involved in the making of the Nordic Pavilion, spanning from kings, prime ministers, bureaucrats, ambassadors, museum directors, architects, and a myriad of artists’ associations, to Venetian dignitaries, engineers, gardeners, lawyers, and plumbers. The pavilion was conceived and built against the backdrop of friendships and animosities, powerplay and diplomacy. The detours and disappointments, the successes and failures of the Venice affair make a prism in miniature to understand the mindset and conflicting ambitions of the Nordic countries in the 1950s and 60s. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished images, among them many photographs taken by Fehn himself, the archival evidence also sheds new light on one of the great Nordic architects of the recent past.

  The last part of the book presents short contributions on various aspects of Fehn’s iconic structure by architects and artists: Daniela Moderini, Helen Dorey, Adrian Forty, John Ochsendorf, Pedram Ghelichi, María Dolores Sánchez-Moya, Camille Norment, Gro Bonesmo, and João Doria de Souza.

  Book

  Published May 6, 2021
  Read more about Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives

• Re-Store

  The Re-Store teaching unit offers new perspectives on the preservation, reuse and transformation of architectural heritage from the recent past, with a special focus on the provenance of building systems, components and materials. Taking an Experimental Preservation approach, the unit responds to the challenges of the climate crisis by renegotiating the way we understand, evaluate, and transform the built environment. Through MA studios and seminars, the unit aims to reinvigorate the discipline by challenging the prevailing ideas of authorship, origins and the integrity of the architectural monument. Engaged in a wide range of practices counting archival studies, value assessment methods, restoration techniques, survey practices, model building, drawing, writing and dissemination, the students are trained to participate in the contemporary discourse with a critical mindset and high design skills. Recent studios have focused on concrete, building systems, prefabrication, building components, petroleum and weather. Re-Store publications include the Tabula Plena (2016), Experimental Preservation (2016) and Concrete Oslo (2018).

  Former Re-Store faculty: Andreas Angelidakis, Thordis Arrhenius, Bård Helland, Amandine Kastler, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Andrea Pinochet, Kim Pløhn, Alena Rieger, Bryony Roberts, Ingrid Dobloug Roede, Erlend Skjeseth, Jørgen Tandberg, Kjetil Sæterdal, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Helle Bendixen Trier, Espen Vatn.

  Course series
  Read more about Re-Store