A present at the opening of the studio exhibition

When I am in Oslo I have found some pleasure being present at OAF meetings debating with the different lecturers coming in from all over the world. The latest occation brought me into a dialogue with the architect and professor Markus Schaefer of Hosoya Schaefer Architects in Zürich. The topics was on the aspects of masterplanning in cities under the impact of financial brakedown, and what informed the firms projects. A really interesting discussion that continued after the meeting and into the night. Markus Schaefer started out his education in biology, then in architecture and finished his master under Rem Koolhaas at Harvard, worked at OMA and was for some time the Director of AMO.
He has just sent me an interview which I find very interesting. Here he comments on studio works, as we have been through in this semester. This interview is then the gift to you.
Marcus opens another text with this quotation, that I find relevant to our studio:

“Mans ability to participate intelligently in the evolution of his own system is dependent on his ability to perceive the whole”
Immanuel Wallerstein
In World System Analysis: An Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004

>pdf

When you hear music its gone in the air

This image from my notebook was used in the discussion with you on storyboards. It is my storyboard for the 10 minutes lecture I gave for 11 departments at the NAL session om Architecture Now, just back from Greenland. As you can see, some of the other lecturers is written into my storyboard giving it new shape and form, they informed my lecture so to speak
It is the only two pages from my notebooks, that has been with me through all the studios we have set up through Jæren and Greenland, that is left in my position.
My computerbag with all technicalities and two completely filled notebooks where stolen from me in Oslo on Friday evening. As you know how much importance and confidence I place in the dialogue, and in the images that these dialogues create, can understand the complete loss I feel after this theft. Even the texts from the last dialogues with you is gone with the wind. But; Alice has made a beatifull poster, positioning this studios in two worlds we have been to and the notions and statements from them as stones in water with rings of knowledge, thouching each other, merging into each other. She has even blocks of texts from the studios. If I could ask for the moon: could each of you post on the blog a comment from one or two of the studios we set up in Jæren and Greenland and give your version of them, just some lines. That would be very good for me, and also for you I hope. A kind of rewriting of your and my learnings. Anything is very welcome - fex Gotfrieds five points from the IRIS studio, and Tarald Omas four columns of wisdom from the Ona Lighthouse studio. The heading "When you hear music its gone in the air" is from the Jazz musician Eric Dolphy. I am eagerly waiting for your small stories - thanks.

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

We will bring a guest with us to Greenland

Øystein Rö from the project Platform and gallery 0047 will go with us to Greenland.
He has promised to give us his long asked for small lecture in the studio we set up at the university of Nuuk.

The Newspaper article in SA creates interest in our studio

The senior advicer Dagfinn Hatløy at Fylkesmannen in Rogaland has sent us this mail and and interesting link, He wants to follow our work - nice! See text below.

Hei!
Leste om arbeidet deres og besøket på Jæren, i Stavanger Aftenblad 15.02.10:
http://www.dahluhre.no/
Undertegnede jobber med arealforvaltning og jordvern hos Fylkesmannen i Rogaland, landbruksavdelingen.
Vi er interessert i å få informasjon om deres arbeid videre. Sett oss gjerne på e-post lista og dersom det er mulig hadde det vært av interesse å bli orientert om når resultatene av arbeidet er tilgjengelig.
Lykke til videre med arbeidet!
Vedlagt følger en link til et prosjekt som ble gjennomført hos oss nylig som kanskje kan ha relevans for dere også, finansiert av Fylkesmannen i Rogaland, Rogaland fylkeskommune og Landbruks- og matdepartementet.
http://www.fylkesmannen.no/hoved.aspx?m=4474&amid=2330695

Dagfinn Hatløy
Seniorrådgiver - arealforvaltning
Fylkesmannen i Rogaland, landbruksavdelinga,
postboks 59, 4001 Stavanger
Tlf: 51 56 89 79
Mob nr 99 50 50 94
Fax: 51 56 89 41
http://www.fylkesmannen.no/rogaland

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

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.

New guest in the studio arrives on Friday

The landscape architect Alf Haukeland, with lots of experience, will be with us on Friday.
He knows the field of Jæren well. Alf will also appear in individual mid-week tutoring later on.
We are teaming up.
KED

Opportunities and collitions - at all tomorrows parties

The diplomas I adviced you to go to is not today, but tomorrow, Thursday, as HenryP has pointed out to me in his blog comment. I have been on two midcrits during the Diploma session and I am personaly very interested in how they has come out. They start the Diploma Reviews tomorrow at 09.00, and Dag Tvilde will lead this day of diplomas.
For our studio the three diplomas to be presented from 09.00 is specially interesting, starting with the home city of two of our Chinese students, I think.
We have invited Geir Nummedal as guest critic tomorrow, and to be a "teacher to come" at our studio, so we have to do some sharp priorities during the day.
BUT - let us ALL meet at Group Room 2 tomorrow at 09.00 and we take ot from there, eventually reorganizing the day a bit.
KED

Diploma reviews

Be aware, there are some diploma reviews on Wednesday that might inform you. Fex "unrealestates of Oslo" and "kretsløpsurbanisme". I have followed this students and wonder how far they have brought their concepts. You find the list of presentations on bakgard.com, and everywhere else at AHO, I will think.

Encircling the Field, summing up

On Thursday, when we are going through your works on the blog we will introduce a guest to be there with us, the landscape architect Geir Nummedal. He did this very interesting diploma in the Grorud Valley, with Anders Hus Folkedal, based on Allan Bergers teaching and theories on Systemic Design that whas introduced during Research on the Norwegian Landscape, part 1. Geir knows the the field we have been encircling in our first phase
Geir and Anders is also writing a text to be included in our Jæren voices and you will meet them both furter down the studio path. I look forward to see and discuss all your works on the blog.
KED

Europan 9 winner, MySpace, to be built in Trondheim

On Wednesday the 27th of January at 14.00, Knut Eirik as president of Europan Norway, is invited to Trondheim at the corner stone ceremony for the Europan 9 winning entry, MySpace. The builder, Studentsamskipnaden i Trondheim is proudly inviting to this important event. Both for them, the city, Europan and the winning Spanish team based in Rotterdam and Madrid; Murado, Elvira and Krahe.
The Knowledge and Science minister Thora Haug will be present. So will the architects.
The project is now starting construction and will be finished in 2011, an important year for Trondheim. More to come on this issue later.

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

City as Biotope - The Book

In the text Encircling the Field I wrote this:
The themes for our spring studio takes of from the notions invented and discovered in the Øresund research. The upcoming Jæren research is strongly supported by the experience we had with the studio at Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) titled “City as Biotope” in the autumn of 2009, exploring Malmö through a Mosaïc Reading.
I’m now sitting with a fresh copy of the book city as biotope mosaic::reading // mindfield malmö in my hands. As I promised you I will bring this book to you as part of the next theme; Imbedded Information.
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

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

THE FOOTPRINT OF OIL ECONOMY

THE FOOTPRINT OF OIL ECONOMY is now part of a disappearing landscape in our field of research. This state of transition is both local, national and global. A new economic landscape is appearing.
When Alice Labadini and I visited Jæren and the new large landslide of a private harbour out in the seascape, it was filled with firms from all over the (oil) world. Haliburton was there, as in Iraq.
The amalgam of international firms in Stavanger is not to bee seen anywhere else in Norway. We discovered the secrecy of this by being prohibited to photograph the large Connoco/Phillips office building in this new harbour area. A research question in our encircling on Jæren is the force and magnitude of this disappearing activities and landscapes. This can be of a very dramatic character.
A cartography of Jæren today has still to contain an enormous seascape, with the oilfields, platforms, pipelines etc. This is certainly in a state of disappearing.

I wrote this little text, some time ago, as part of an invitation to the journalist Ingunn Økland to write herself into our research.

Our Canadian architect friend Kelly Doran send us this images of the agressivenes, a new appearance of the global oil companies in Alberta, hunting for oil sand. This smart diagrams and undeniable arguments are part of a larger research he is doing on the Canadian governments attitudes towards sustainability. Diagrams to learn from in our research on Jæren, don’t you think?

Kellys own comments goes like this:
“Here they are....basically, the GIS information from the Province is the source data for the Lease holds and sizes. I then just took a map of Europe and scaled it to compare areas. Feel free to use them how ever you wish.
Moral of the story; given how poorly Canada showed at Copenhagen, it would seem pretty obvious that a host of foreign nations have vested interests in the Oil Sands.
This list could continue to include of course the Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Koreans”.

I think you will meet with Kelly at AHO during our first session or theme, Encircling the Field, that goes for the two first weeks of our studio.

KED