Last week the diploma students got their critique and today the jury held a lecture about their experience of the presentations and projects. Boris Brorman Jensen talked about the importance of the critique as a way of conducting the diploma judgement and gave us some statistics from his half of the projects concerning themes and approaches.

This indicates a general idea of a local and personal approach to projects, while the next chart described the variety of ways in which these topics were handled.

There was a spread even within the various themes as to how they handled their own setting. Boris left us with a few questions to consider for future projects and our engagement with our own profession. How do we choose to communicate our projects? This is interesting as far as convention is concerned. In what way do the project need to describe itself? What is the relevant debate we want to raise and on what arena? As Boris stated  the architectural debate is a public matter and the conventional vocabulary might not communicate as well in a tabloid setting or a meeting with the public of a municipality for example.

His other question, which I touched in on now is the debate and theme following the project. Boris pointed out that projects siting external references along their process often brought a wider discussion to the critique as well. The personal projects had an ability to be overly autonomous and hard to discuss in their relation to anything else. It can be very fruitful to the development of a project as well as the debate around its themes to introduce external sources in the process and presentation as well as influence the focus of the critique.

As last semester didn’t see any updates in the blog I’ll try to back blog a few things. First up is some images from our class excursion to Barcelona, my second visit there.

Psychogeographic Mapping, Sydney
Half semester assignment

The assignment based on ‘Project 360°’ by Frank Dresmé and produced a psycho-geographic mapping of a route through the CBD as well as dialogue with the public through distribution of these maps in the city. I mapped out… [more]

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

Alternative Fuel Strategy, Sydney
Main semester assignment

The building is the first stage in a long term strategy, a system that can grow at a economically sustainable rate and take on the shifts in consumer habits and trends. A franchise network of alternative fuel stations spreading from… [more]