As far as courses go I’m attending The Why Factory and specifically the studio BiodiverCity. The course is run by Alexander Sverdlov and Felix Madrazo with Winy Maas as head professor. It takes on the idea of the future city and how to deal with a situation where humans can not only build for themselves, but also consider who we are and can share our habitats with.

The studio has just started so I’ll try to keep updating about some of the activities along the semester. Our classroom is inside the 3 story orange pyramid seen under which became the new classroom after the old architecture faculty burnt down in 2008 I believe. It’s quite nice and since we’re only 10 students in the studio we get to be around a fairly easily handled group.

Some time soon I will also know which workshop I’ve gotten into, so I hope to get my first choice for that as well. As for this week I’m off to Amsterdam to research the way it is populated by birds and to Utrecht to examine a couple of buildings for my Bulding Technology course.

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.

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]

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

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]

The building is a flexible apartment complex with up to 4 families or a total of about 20 people. The private areas are of moderate size, however shared activity rooms on the 1st floor, the plaza in front of the building and the roof top… [more]

The center is a cultural and academic meeting point for the development of ideas towards a sustainable urban life style. The building works on principles… [more]

2 month group assignment
Exhibition December 2009 to January 2010 in Moss.

MiU is an instigator to attract young academics and intensify the urban center of the town. An approximate of 60.000 inhabitants should be a goal along with great infrastructure through high speed trains and more airport activity… [more]

Leebus Woods’ Architecture School 401 is a series where he discuss this strategy and show examples of what he has been doing with his classes. Work that show how his classes learn both technical and theoretical lessons through more or less abstract projects. The closest I’ve been myself to these sorts of approaches have been through my 3rd semester ‘Urbanism and the City’ course with Adrian Lahoud and Frank Minnaert at UTS where we made a Psychogeographic Map and a video presentation of our reading of the city.

Lately I’ve seen several voices that comment on this kind of approach and in Germany this summer the DIA holds a conference called ‘Design Education as Research Lab’ with speakers from many of the most famous schools of architecture around the world.

I’ve visited an exhibition and synopsis at HCU Hamburg ‘Explorationen: Tendenzen und Potentiale der Architekturforschung’ and ‘Stop Making Sense’ which showcased a project of theoretical work with essays and graphics.

It’s fascinating to see good fusion of theory, design and built items and I really hope for less separation of the parts in school as well as a more research oriented approach in the earlier stages of architecture school. The essentials of architectural practice should be possible to teach through more though provoking means than emulating the work life and also be valuable to the schools research output in the long run.