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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
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• 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
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• 

  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

  Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture, a focus that was at once intellectual, visceral, historical, and contemporary. As well as exploring how architecture had shaped systems of cultural orientation in the past, Warburg and his followers were involved a continual process of architectural commissioning in the present. Between 1923 and 1958 designs were initiated for a collection of buildings, interiors, and exhibitions, as the Warburg Library moved through a series of homes, first in Hamburg and then in London. All these projects provided opportunities for expressing the relationship between architecture, intellectual order, and memory.

  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture, portraying six building projects from archival material. Detailed architectural models made by students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and accompanying contributions from Dag Erik Elgin, Uwe Fleckner, Elizabeth Sears, Bill Sherman, and Claudia Wedepohl, show how architectural repetition, reinscription, and movement shaped a seminal research institution.

  “The buildings that housed Aby Warburg’s library were designed by some of the most prominent Modernists, and employed the latest in communication and information techniques. This original and beautiful book reconstructs the architectural journey of the Warburg Institute, adding a new dimension to the disciplinary insights developed there: the vehicular migration of images across time and place.”

  Caroline van Eck
  Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge

  Book

  Published Nov 1, 2023
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• 

  Sverre Fehn og Bronsealderen

  Article

  Published Sep 15, 2023
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• Transformation in Practice: Centralteateret

  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.

  
  

  Course

  Fall 2022
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• 

  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
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• Demolition, Disappearance, Recurrence: Interludes in Architectural History

  The destructions of Maison du Peuple (Brussels, Belgium) and Militærhospitalet (Oslo, Norway) were a means to an end for 1960s progress. Development plans once assumed their disposal, but international dissent turned the quick demolitions into systematic deconstructions. Hard-fought battles between those wishing to demolish and those hoping to preserve lead to the partial deconstruction, decades-long storage, and ex-situ spoliation of the buildings. Material disappearance catalysed the accumulation of documentation; archives related to Maison du Peuple and Militærhospitalet are preoccupied with the interlude between demolition and reconstruction. If architectural history tends to recount the motivation and conception of buildings, then this thesis aims to detail their post-demolition afterlives. Demolition is already integral to architecture and implicit in its history, but scholars have repeatedly noted its near absence in architectural history. By asking how rather than why these buildings were demolished, this thesis shifts focus from conception to reception, from beginning to end, and from author to owners.

  PhD
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• Portal Propagations. Reproduction, Reception, and Reconstruction in the Life of the Urnes Portal

  The Urnes Portal stands preserved seemingly frozen in time as world heritage, as part of a 12th century stave church overlooking the Luster fjord on the Norwegian west coast. Yet, the portal and other spoliated carvings that are reused in the building once formed the entrance of an earlier 11th century church and continue to grow in iconicity through their perpetually reproduced image. As a preservational paradox, 19th century recordings made as an act of safeguarding also represent a point of provenience in the making of a monument that has spawned its further reproduction through painting, drawings, photography, plaster casts, carvings, to contemporary tattoos and commercial packaging. But what effect does this prolific reproduction have on the portal, the monument as a whole, and the way it is read through its extended image? Portal Propagations examines how the Urnes Portal has been reproduced, received, and reinvented over time forming many shoots of new life as part of its overall reach.

  Portal Propagations also turns a glance towards the future. Through interaction with the working practices of Factum Foundation, this dissertation examines the changing techniques of reproduction. Digital technologies are enhancing the process, allowing for higher fidelity and closer objective proximity to the original. The thesis looks into how such processes are expanding a possible spectrum of reproductive authorship within a copy-creation dichotomy, and how yet new techniques might be used to reconstruct and re-explore the original architectural situation of the Urnes Portal as an extension of the scholarly attempts that have strived to reconstruct the lost 11th century church.

  Through the scrutiny of a single artefact, Portal Propagations examines how monuments are made, how they continue to grow through their circulated images, and how changing attitudes to reproductions can offer a refreshed view of originality.

  PhD
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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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