Moss Innovative University, Moss

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]

School is a stage where the students gets prepped and ready to take part in and fulfill the work they will have afterwards. However the higher education schools also have their own inherent work, their research. Maybe giving the whole student body a chance to participate and learn through research would make a long education feel like it had more purpose at times. Many assignments bear the banner that they mimic the nature of ‘real life’ work situations, but of course you always only touch a few basic sides of a projects demands. You never get to the subtle details that would make it a full out reenactment of a ‘real’ project.

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.

Today we wrapped up the design studio of the semester. Some really interesting projects were produced through the semester. I went early yesterday and were the 2nd to present. All in all I think I got to touch onto some interesting points around the distribution of public space and communication between program nodes within a limited site. Everything were wrapped in a study of environmentally conscious if not friendly building that let me look at some basic principles of energy efficient building physics.

On Tuesday we have an exam in building physics. After that the whole year is done and a holiday break waits. I might try to get the portfolio section up and running sometime over summer. The intention is to get up a some projects starting with recent once, but I’ll try to backtrack a bit too. First of all I have to figure out how I want the design to be.

Finally I’ve handed in my essay. I wish we had been working more actively with this along our design studio over the semester as much of what I find in my essay could have come to good use this year. I’ll take it along for next semester however and hope I get to write more over the years. I think this is the first essay I write where I feel that I’m getting a lot back from the writing process myself.

Spring is time for traveling. Over Easter I went to London with Sabrina and tried to negotiate a bit of Architecture, culture and mandatory shopping. It was really great to get out of Oslo and away from studio for a while even if it had a bit of an impact on the work flow.

We split the stay into two by living in Lambeth for 2 nights and Kings Cross 3 nights. We switched between moving around by foot and by tube every other day to get a combination of rest for the legs and fresh air. This little alleyway here is right around the corner from the Barbican Cantre where they had a great exhibition of Le Corbusier’s work as well as a cool experimental rapid prototyping exhibition in the Curve. Well worth a trip.

On Easter Sunday we went to morning mass in St. Paul’s Cathedral. The acoustics were amazing while the choir sang, but the sound technician who put up the speakers for the preacher didn’t do his sound test before he left I think. It was a really nice experience to see such a great religious building in use and not just full of people being told to turn off their cameras.

This week I’m wrapping up my essay on the use of diagrams in contemporary architecture and the main focus has been on UN Studio and the Design Model. It is very interesting to think of what a design process means and how knowledge is carried on and expanded upon in each project.

On Sunday I’m off to Paris to combine business and pleasure as I go on a school trip and meet up with Sabrina half way through the week to get some time with her as I’m down there anyways.