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• Broadcasting NRK

  The studio will work collectively, focusing on a significant national monument, the NRK broadcasting building. Few buildings carry as many traces and has been so close a witness to critical changes within Norwegian society. Yet due to the technical nature of the building, as well as the decidedly unresolved relationship between media and architecture, it lingers undescribed at the borders of the canon of Norwegian modernism. That the building has now been declared obsolete and sold to a private developer should tell us something about the great changes happening within mass media and the culture industry, and in the buildings created to facilitate it – yet also perhaps something about real estate and the valuation of the building stock, including monuments. The fact that the NRK institution can be moved, largely without dissenting voices, to another location, testifies to an enigma at the heart of the relationship between architecture and state media. Throughout the semester, we will engage in archival research, theoretical readings and group discussions, combined with modelmaking and 1:1 surveys in order to create three small exhibits in school, culminating in a larger and more comprehensive public exhibition: “Broadcasting NRK”.

  The studio is taught by Jørgen Tandberg and Jonas Løland-

  Course

  Spring 2024
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• Architecture and the Archives

  The Architecture and the Archives studio series aims to address the expanding scope of evidence used to value existing buildings in projects of restoration, reconfiguration or adaption. As methods for valuing architecture develop, existing buildings are often the focus of intense argument involving cultural, political and economic debate. Both public pressure and ecological concern make the threshold for demolishing existing buildings ever higher, and assessing when a building’s life is over, or when to advocate repair and reuse, requires a new set of skills from the architect. Tools and methods borrowed from architectural history and theory, preservation and curatorial practices are used to comprehend and communicate cultural meaning. Knowledge about a building’s conception, construction and materials, as well as its previous function and its ownership history, are all relevant.

  This studio series expands the Norwegian canon by investigating buildings and architects on the border of mainstream narratives. Students adopt a twofold archival and curatorial approach, researching individual architectural objects and producing display material. Working methods range from archival research, site surveys, re-drawing and re-modelling, to reading seminars and discussions with invited speakers, and to the development of exhibition ideas and the design and construction of display cases.

  Jørgen Johan Tandberg teaches the Architecture and the Archives studio series.

  Former studios and seminars in the series have been taught by Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum, with exhibitions at Kunstnernes Hus, the Norwegian Parliament, the Architecture Museum, and the Museum of Cultural History.

  Course series
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• Resonance and Reverberation: Broadcasting Architecture

  In 2020, the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK sold its properties at Marienlyst to developer Ferd for 3.75 bill NOK who plans on transforming one of Norway’s most important nation-building institutions into a private development project. The original broadcasting building, Kringkastingshuset, was designed by architect Nils Holter (1899–1995), after a 1935 competition. It was at the time a completely new building typology and given the novelty of broadcasting technology, Holter’s task was to plan for the unforeseen demands of a new media and its spatial requirements. Broadcasting buildings were machines whose exact purpose was yet to be fully understood, and Kringkastingshuset’s longevity can be attributed to the fact that Holter and his client had the foresight to plan the NRK site to give a flexible framework for a public institution in growth.Holter's practice would continue working with NRK for nearly half a century, extending and reorganizing the original building as well as adding additional buildings in a kind of open work-style, according to a rapidly changing technology.

  The history of the broadcasting building as recounted in this dissertation is being pieced together from thousands of letters, reports, contracts, and parliamentary bills preserved in the archives of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, and previously unexplored by architectural historians. Marienlyst is an important work of monumental public architecture and a highly complex piece of technical infrastructure. The project has never had a completion date but remained in a state of flux. In this way, an inherent incompleteness is directly linked to its longevity. The thesis is about one of the most radical building typologies of the 20th century, at the moment when it is declared obsolete.

  PhD
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