60 619 null (Spring 2025)

As part of Oslo Hydropolis studio sequence the studio explores landscape-based, water-sensitive urbanism within the Oslo Metropolitan Region. In face of climate change with its increasing risks of draught and flooding, and continuing urbanisation pressure, the studio proposes a complementary approach to the current paradigm of compact city development –with all its blind spots, such as the relocation of production and commerce into areas “out of sight”. The studio sequence engages with the functional requirements of climate adaptation as much as spatial aesthetics and possible everyday practices.

The course takes the infrastructural back-end of urbanism –the storage and distribution of goods and water– to the fore and actively explores its potential spatiality and sociality.

Specifically, the studio will design a cross-scalar landscape framework as the basis for development. It will re-consider one of the “out of debate“ sites and propose a counter-proposal to existing or planned expansion of commercial areas in the Oslo region. While accepting, albeit in the short term, the need of large warehouses accelerated by online retailing, the studio will propose concepts for better embedding the program better into the wider landscape and hydrological context. It aims to harness the dynamics of property development linked to the global economy to regenerate and spatially qualify the emerging landscape for both non-human and human use - if not enjoyment.

The planning and architecture of space-consuming buildings often fails to pronounce material, spatial and environmental values. The conviction of this studio is that the scope, the frame, the dimensions, the performance, and atmospheres inherent to water-sensitive planning and landscape architecture can provide a long-term transformative perspective to urban development, opening up the frame to a more sustainable future.

The methodology of the studio is based on merging planning and design, on oscillating between bird’s eye and eye-level view and shifts continuously between digital and analogue tools.

Knowledge:
The studio will provide students with the conceptual categories to address adaptation to climate change in an urbanising regional context through a landscape architectural perspective. The studio will enter design through the scales of hydrology, and enforce the understanding of landscape as infrastructure as well as a mode of perception. Form will be discussed in relation to performance as well as to space and place.

• Acquaintance of notions of watershed and sustainable water management.
• Acquaintance of cultural landscape as a spatial product of geological and climatic forces as well as cultural, political and economic interests and practices layered in time.
• Basic knowledge of landscape as a productive, performative layer in human systems: ecological infrastructure, ecosystem services, and regenerative agriculture.
• Advanced knowledge of landscape patterns, form and urban structure: application of landscape ecology’s structural concepts and environmental psychology to shape spaces and places.

Skills:
Students develop skills to envision urban projects as embedded within cultural landscapes with the goal to ensure adaptability to climate change. Research-driven, multi-layered and multi-scalar in its scope, the studio builds the capacity to conduct a layered and visual analysis of the territorial/regional context, the ability to reference precedents, to fuse technical and aesthetic aspects of form giving, and finally to frame and argue for a well-resolved design proposal anchored within the scale of the territory.

• Research: Capacity to select and sort, and evaluate data from greater information quantities; ability to conduct precedent analysis and transfer.
• Analysis: ability to carry out landscape analysis based on map work (GIS and morphological analysis) and field work (photography).
• Strategy: capability to develop scenarios for a watershed, development of propositions related to water flows and cycles for concrete case areas.
• Iterative design process: trial and error to find adequate solutions, successive and iterative usage of drawings, plans, sections, physical and digital models, as well as texts variants, to test and develop proposals, in favour for “unsafe” experimental approaches.
• Interrogative design: explicit discussion of a formal question to organize a spatial field and site design.
• Design resolution: ability to work out a territorial approach on a detailed level, including grading, planting, surface textures.
• Representation: capability to illustrate design through compelling plans, sections, as well as digital and physical models and model photography.
• Communication: problem definition, framing of a task within the given context of the studio; skill to verbally and visually argue for a project through telling of a well-argued narrative.

General competence:
The studio’s underlying thesis will encourage the rethinking of urban and environmental challenges as opportunities to develop place-specific and social spaces for the future. The studio’s main competence goal is to equip students with the ability to frame their projects in a larger socially and environmentally relevant context, state ideas, translate these into form, and to apply theoretical and technical background in project work, as well as to use the project as an investigative vehicle to address professional and disciplinary questions. Both individual and group work will be trained.

Group work (2-3 students) and individual work is organised around 5 phases. The phases will be supported by input lectures to facilitate familiarization with discourse and workshops to kick-off design.

1. FOUNDATION 1:1 / 1:50.000/ 1:7500 – Portrait of a Landscape. Uncovering the deep structure and dynamic character of the watershed as context of planning and design.

• “Journalistic" research
• Scape Map: Morphological Analysis GIS, CAD, PSD
• Tracing of landform, water structure and land use pattern, hand drawing
• Writing of a story

1. FRAMEWORK Strategy scale 1:7500 /1:5000 – Development of a Landscape Framework for a logistic park along different scenarios regarding the degree of transformation and political ambition.

• “Transplant” of large-scale landscape architectures and regenerative principles onto the site resulting in a physical strategy model (with topography, vegetation as mass and void)
• Laser-cut “Paper lace" of Landscape Framework, resp. its spatial figure
• Diagrammatic plans of ground modification (“cut and fill”), water flows and planting

1. FRAMEWORK Detail Scale 1: Eye-level / Eye-level / 1: 50 / 1:20 – Development of the spatial and material qualities of the Landscape Framework through a “Scene“.

• Documentary Site Photography
• Scenographic model photography of a spatial scene with vegetation, ground and water at eye-level
• Detail plan and section of a typical part of the Landscape Framework

1. INFILL 1:1000/ 1:500, 1:200 – Elaboration of the relationship between long-term landscape framework and short-term architecture, water management and planting

• (Digitally fabricated) physical model
• Section and plan of selected space
  

1. COMMUNICATION – Visualization and “telling” the proposals to communicate to a broader audience.

• Writing of a project description (abstract)
• Production of explanatory drawings
• Oral and visual presentation of the whole project
• Curation and production of an exhibition (AHO works or off-campus)

Excursion:

The studio will travel within Europe to study landscape frameworks and public space materialisations. Transport (flight), accommodation, and food will be on the expense of students. Entrance fees will eventually be covered by the studio. Those who cannot/do not wish to join the trip will study the visited projects through drawing.

Attendance:

Physical attendance for teaching, guidance, reviews, and other educational activities is expected and necessary to achieve the learning outcomes. Students are expected to attend class on studio teaching days throughout the semester and participate in weekly desk-crits. These desk-crits, held either in studio or via Zoom, will involve presenting and discussing new research or design work.

Form of assessment: Portfolio assessment

Grouping: Individual

Grading scale: Pass/fail

Comment: Students will be assessed through oral, model and graphic presentations, as well as digital submissions at the end of each studio phase. Additionally, there will be a final presentation.

The final grade will be based on an assessment of all submissions, with a strong emphasis on design work (70%).