Monday last week at DogA the winners of the Norwegian EuroPan 10 were announced and my course was lucky enough to get a 2 day intensive workshop with the winning teams. I signed up for the team that won Haugerud, Oslo with the project ‘Shuffle’. Eriksen and Skajaa are both graduates of Bergen school of Architecture BAS and gave us an introduction to how they work there and especially their class called ‘the other world’ (DAV). We all visited a possible site for this semesters assignment with the aim to map out the area in a specific way to see if we could approach the area in a way  we didn’t expect.

My team set out to map the variation of smells around Grorud Senter and found ourselves fumbling around with a tiny map trying to get to our pre-pinned grid points.

Of course this exercise led us to explore the area both at an odd time and get local knowledge of the urban fabric we only knew from plans, however, as far as smells go, -10 degrees and winds doesn’t really make it much of a work collaborator at 2AM. Well back at Uni we tried to synchronize our experiences and arrange our descriptions categorically. Some smells were specific to certain typologies while others stemmed from people or nature.

The concept of bringing in smell and materials actively to create an atmosphere and a idea of space through proximity might be something to pick up later in the semester, but the mapping itself gave more of an idea about the variety and defined zoning that makes up the Grorud valley at the moment.

View Groruddalen Kulturhus areas in a larger map