CHARGING THE LANDSCAPE WITH NEW ENERGY

When I first had to give my own interpretation to charging the landscape with new energy - a statement which is not mine, but that I find extremely fascinating, and to a large extent enlightening - I had this image in mind, of an extensive knowledge and intention compressed in intense operative lines able to apply an explosive tranformation power to the physical scene we are researching upon. (...)

>pdf

Jæren and water quality

Aksjon Jærvassdrag ( The Jæren water act ) has a lot of information concerning biodiversity and water quality. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like there is an English page so all information is in Norwegian only.

For those of you concerned with water quality i recommend these reports :

Rapport RF - 2003/060 for good maps about watersheds and water pollution sources.

Rapport IRIS 2009/037 for the latest update on the water quality situation.

It seems like Orre is subject to one of the worst situation concerning nutrient loading from agriculture in the whole of Norway. There are also reports about sitings of bluegreen algae on a large scale - also called Cyanobacteria. Doing some fast research about Cyanobacteria helped me find this interesting article.

See you all tomorrow at school.

Anders

PROGRAMME // NUUK GREENLAND TRIP AHO // 02.03.10 – 08.03.10

TUESDAY // 02.03.10
09.10 // Departure Copenhagen, be at the airport 2 hours before departure
14.30 // Arrival Nuuk
Resident address: Group up for four apartments, this will also be the working teams for the whole week
Time // Introduction at the university, which is our base (with all facilities)
Time // Dinner // Nuuk

WEDNESDAY // 03.03.10
10.00 // Morning dialogue // Nuuk Voices
12.00 // Lunch
Time // NUUK CITY WALK // Filming, photo, drawing, observing (the mythos of Blok P and more)
15.00 // Jørgen Chemnitz in his home, journalist, writer photographer
Time // Dinner // Nuuk
20.00 // Lecture // Øystein Rø 0047

THURSDAY // 04.03.10
09.00 // ASIAQ, mapping Greenland
10.15 // Morning dialogue // Nuuk voices
Time // Lunch
Afternoon // Work

FRIDAY // 05.03.10
09.00 // Morning dialogue
Morning // Work
Time // Lunch
Time // Deadline work
15.30 // Inspired presentation at GrønlandsBanken for the sponsors of our journey
Time // Exhibition at Katuaq // Pia Arke

SATURDAY // 06.03.10
Morning // Free
Afternoon // Boattrip
Evening // Event

SUNDAY // 07.03.10
12-16 // Public discussion at Katuaq about Pia Arkes work, and more

MONDAY // 08.03.10
Time // Departure Nuuk

Inuit tactile maps

Yesterday two of our friends tipt us simultaniously about a blogpost on BLDGBLOG about Inuit tactile maps of the Greenland coastline. Marianne Skjulhaug called from Bergen and Ross Langdon sent a mail from Uganda (!). Follow the link and learn more. It is truly intriguing.

The carving is 300 years old and shows the coastline with fjords, islands, nunataks and glaciers. The outline of the coast is carried up one side and down the other.


Aviaaja and Helena from tnt nuuk is arriving in Tromsø today. We are sure they can tell us more about these maps and maybee we can see them for ourselves when we go to Nuuk...

Using Existing Resources to Spawn a New Era in Renewable Energy

I came across a very interesting text yesturday.

The title is "Commercial-Scale Production of Algae Biodiesel: Using Existing Resources to Spawn a New Era in Renewable Energy" and can be found here. In brief this text is looking into algae farms as a means of producing the next generation bio fuels and how the "food" for the algae could be agriculture runoff amongst others. Could the future players of oil production be the farmers of Jæren?

IMPORTANT! PAYMENT FOR THE GREENLAND JOURNEY

Everybody that is going to Greenland must pay 3210 NOK to tnt nuuk's account as soon as possible! tnt nuuk has prepayed the tickets. Mark the payment with your name.


GL3064710002004248 - iban

GRENGLGX - swift

tnt nuuk a/s
Po.Box 189
3900 Nuuk – Grønland

They explore the future Jæren Landscape

This is the title on the journalist Odd Pihlstrøms article in Stavanger Aftenblad Monday the 15th of February. Odd Pihlstrøm opened up and connected us to a series of voices in the Jæren agricultural Landscape. Four of this voices, and Odd Pihlstrøm, attended our debate studio set up at Ona Lighthouse (see the attached article) in a beautiful afternoon on the brim of the Atantic. An open and intense discussion took place for three hours, with the student eagerly participating – Oh What a Perfect Day.
On our three day journey in Jæren, brilliant organized by Alice Labadini, we set up five such studios in different places with impressive participation from cutting edge environments in Stavanger. De utforsker framtidens jærlandskap - PDF
Photo: Odd Philstrøm, Stavanger Aftenblad

Looking for what’s not there

by Anders Hus Folkedal

This text is written by Anders Hus Folkedal, and I will try to sum up the experiences we (myself and my fellow college Geir Nummedal) had working with Alan Berger and his methods of Systemic Design in the course of our studies at AHO 2008-2009.

The text will consist of two main chapters. The first chapter is our experiences working in the context of the Stavanger region. The second chapter will focus on our diploma work within the Groruddalen context north-east of Oslo city center. Oral statements in this text are based on memory alone and might not be totally accurate.

> pdf

GREENLAND: A window of opportunity - NOW

Dear students
WE can now go on a study tour to Greenland! The fantastic Aviaaja Karlshøj here in Greenland have managed to get ca 90 000 DKR in support for our studio, to go to Greenland and the capital Nuuk. A lot of institutions here are supporting your travel, and they all want you to take part in the Appearing Nuuk concept.
The journalist Jörgen Chemnitz said that Geenland now as opened a window of opportunity, an that it is a call for action in the next five years. With a new Self Government a completely new situatation is established. You are now invited to take part in this.
We will leave from Copenhagen Tuesday the 2. of Mars in the morning, and return Monday the 8. of Mars.
We are holding at least 20 tickets with the travelling büreau until Monday at ca 13.00. To get ok prizes you have to decide NOW. With the economic support, and free housing here in Nuuk, your total costs, including travel from Oslo to Copenhagen will be maximum 4000 NKR, and it may be less because more support may appear. Aviaaja is working hard on it. So a once in a lifetime journey is open for you, following in teh path of the Jæren Viking Eirik Raude.
So contact Alice, be at the school monday morning - an the Greenland journey will take place.
From Knut Eirik and Kjerstin on a beautifull sunny Saturday. We are now going on a Nuuk Safari with a lot of people, debating Nuuk and Greenland futures.

IMBEDDED INFORMATION

We now enter the second part of our course - what we have previously called "Imbedded Information". An informative text for you has been written by me, Knut Eirik and Ellen: few lines on its departure points:

Our friend, The Danish journalist and architect Peter Schulz Jørgensen/PSJ wrote

this to us today:

”I have just eyed your new publication, City as Biotope. Wow - it is super. There are many points of no return. It opens and asks questions, but at the same time it points at actual and possible transitional qualities. In my New York project I work with cases that in one way or the other has such transitional qualities. It is everything from mural paintings, the birth of hip hop in Bronx in the most difficult of times (the youth negated their situation), bicycle culture and the street, intergration of social and sustainable solutions, homeless people that fights for a place to live and a lot more. A little cacafonic, but that is how it is. It should point towards the question on the power in the city”

PSJ is deeply into how change appear and come to the surface – vizualing change.

Ellen Braae wrote this little blogpost to our studio titled ”Looking for change”:

“Every change is a sign of adjustment, reaction or a search for something new. Every change is a sign of energy, of interest. Something is appearing or disappearing. When you go to Jæren and have the chance to talk to people, people with specialist knowledge within their field, then ask them for changes: good, bad, neutral whatsoever, just looking for metamorphoses and anamorfoses, appearings and disappearing. Please collect all this information, categorize and geolocate it – even though it might be complex, contradictory, and be similar to Borges' taxanomi as refered to by Foucault”.

These small texts opens up for the question “what informs your concept” which will be returning again and again in our studio. Read once again Ellens text “The agency of setting the brief” where she explore fluid situations and the importance of argumentation.

Here the full text as >pdf.

Diary of a Jaeren survey: A Landscape of coexisting forces

This report of our first journey to Jaeren in november 2009 is also my attempt to problematise a landscape marked by the traces of different - yet unresolved - coexistences.

Read the full document here.

Thouching on Jæren agriculture and water systems

In the Mosaïc Region concept (our 1. prize in the Øresund Vision 2040 competition) the aspect of survival and food production and the 100 mile diet was explored. Our guest writers in this concept, the journalist Peter Sylwan and Professor in Agriculture at Ellen Braaaes institute in Copenhagen, Jörgen Primdahl, unfolded possible futures in this field - in Swedens most valuable agricultural field, Skåne. In a conversation with Maya, in our studio, we agreed that she had started a path of detecting new and interesting projects in the Jæren territory. What elements of new thinking is out there, was posed as a question. And we thought of the possibility of “painting a tableau” of the experimental Jæren to come. Following up this dialogue I have been in search of, and made contact with, some smart experts that can explore this together with us.
Download the full text here
KED

ENCIRCLING THE FIELD

And what costume shall the poor girl wear
To all tomorrow's parties

Welcome to the studio Appearing and Disappearing Landscapes, Research on the Norwegian Landscape, Part 2. Download the full Encircling the field paper.

Index:

Research Part 1 – Three positions
Research part 2: Our position and some discoveries
Our Point of Departure
Our teachers – the Dynamics of Small Cultures
The structure of the studio
THE STUDIO BLOG – To exhibit is to open up
And what costume shall the poor girl wear..

KED

The Agency of Setting the Brief – Or How We Act as Urban Designers

This text consists of three parts in my humble attempt to address some fundamental questions concerning contemporary urban conditions and how we respond to them as urban designers or planners. In part one I cut out current accounts and go straight to the outlining of what I find the most promising urban paradigm. In part two I shift focus to the question of collecting information or creating knowledge and in the final part I discuss possible operations for encircling the field and setting a brief.

Download the full pdf

FOUND PAPERS

Welcome to the studio and the studio blog. The studio is built up around four to six themes during the semester. The first theme is titled Encircling the Field, and contains assignment 1. It will go for the first to weeks, theN follows the theme Imbedded Information that will go over three weeks, and so on. A variety of exciting guests will be introduced for you under each theme.
Timetable and content will appear on the blog and on moodle before we start up the 11th of January. The first three days of the first session is compact. All the teachers will be there, including prof. Ellen Braae from Forrest and Landscape at Life Sciences/Copenhagen University. She will give a lecture on our encircling of Jæren.
Each theme, or session, will start up with a text from the teachers, and introducing what we can call Found Papers. This is reference texts that will be part of the common studio library.
Alice Labadini, who is teaching in the studio, will send you three Found Papers for the first theme, Encircling the Field, very soon on mail. For you to have some nice reading in the beginning of the new year.
This texts is short; an interview, a conversation and a chronicle. The texts can be seen as opening a passage for you to do your own hunt for relevant and interesting information, expanding the studio library. This means that you will not get a large unreadable reference list of literature at the start, but it will expand during the studio – also with your findings.
Everything will be on the blog which is a main studio tool.

The quotation from the first text, The Planetary Gardener, introduces us to a fact of the studio; The students arrives from very different backgrounds, field of study and countries.
And it opens up a view into the work of Gilles Clément
The text also invites us into the French scene of landscape architecture where we find people like Michel Desvigne, the fascinating Gilles Vexlard who was teaching in the research part 1, and the prominent force in the French discussion for decades, at the Versailles school, Michel Corajoud. This field also includes Sebastian Marot which Ellen Braae surely will introduce, or at least her Phd student, Svavo Riisto (who is from Jæren) may do it.

“He bases his position on the work of sustained observation, patient experimentation, a knowledge fed by all sorts of cross-disciplinary relationships. This complement the knowledge he acquired during his constant travels – to which Algeria, which he saw as a child, South Africa which he saw as an adolescent, and Nicaragua as a development aid volunteer, constituted the prologue. His attitude is the opposite of that of a specialist”.
Interview by Loretta Coen with Gilles Clément in Scape2007/2

The second text has informed our work a lot and opens up the American landscape urbanism movement and Stan Allens own work and thinking. This conversation between Allen and Sauter also referes to, and is informed by, the social antrophologist Gregory Bateson. The author of Mind and nature and Steps to an ecology of mind which informed me a lot the first time I introduced the notion Appearing and Disappearing Landscapes, at the symposium Architecture and Territory in 1988.
In Florian Sauters conversation with Stan Allen the notion imbedded information relates to what a concept, a project, introduces and opens for:

“One of the things we learnt from Bateson is that he understands ecology as information exchange. He is essentially applying a kind of cybernetic model to natural ecologies. This seems to me very powerfull for a number of reasons.: first of all it does not idealize natural ecology as opposed to social ecology or any other kind of ecology. In other words you can understand all of them as systems of informational exchange. For example if you look at Central Park: it is a landscape with a certain amount of imbedded information. That imbedded information could be comprehended from the fact that the traffic is separated at different levels or that there is a way people have of using it with big open spaces that provoke one kind of activity and dense landscapes that provoke another kind of activity.
You can separate Central Park from its sort of cultural or historical context and then you can understand what works about it. The brilliance of Central Park arises from this continued usability” and Stan Allen summons up in this way:
“Olmsted hit the dynamic just right: there is enough information to keep the system alive, but not to much to overdeterminate the uses”.
Conversation between Stan Allen and Florian Sauter
Archtectural papers III, Natural Metaphor, An Anthology of Essays on Architecture and Nature. ETH/Actar


When we discovered Iñaki Àballos El Pais text, “I would prefer not to” ( in the original version from El Pais/March 2007 titled Bartleby, the architect) as part of the up-front Mosaïc Reading, we discovered his conclusion and introduced our winning competition entry in The Öresund Visions 2040 with this:

“ A credible map of sustainability has yet to be drawn, but there can be no doubt that other aspects already trailed and trialled have run out of whatever credibility they had”.
This lines, imbedded in the text, was presented as the headliner for the mosaic concept and informed our project, gave a direction to it.
Archtectural papers III, Natural Metaphor, An Anthology of Essays on Architecture and Nature. ETH/Actar

This can of course be a reminder for the research and the concepts that will evolve during our studio. Have a nice reading, and open the blog and the web libraries.

Happy new year
Knut Eirik/KED