Courses

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

  Fall 2024

  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.

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• Re-Store: Weather →

  Spring 2024

  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.

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• Re-Store: Petroleum →

  Fall 2023

  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.

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