Re-inscribing the Warburg Institute

Elective, Spring 2021
Tim Anstey and Mari Lending

Collaborating with Blaker gamle Meieri outside Oslo, the Warburg Institute in London, the Warburg-Haus in Hamburg and the Bard Graduate Centre in New York, OCCAS is developing a travelling exhibition on the architecture of the Warburg Institute. The first exhibition opens at Blaker May 1, 2021.   When the Warburg Institute was transferred from Hamburg […]

Moving Monuments: Rome

Studio, Fall 2020
Victor Plahte Tschudi (course responsible), Tim Anstey, Joe Crowdy, Mari Hvattum, Mari Lending and Even Smith Wergeland

The OCCAS studio course Moving Monuments: Rome comes in its third edition this year, inviting a novel take on historical monuments. It traces a selection of monuments through history – as well as history through its many mediations. “Moving” may refer to the actual transportation of architecture but also to the circulation and recreation of monuments in various […]

Printed Architecture: Treasures from the AHO Library

Elective, Fall 2020
Mari Hvattum and Victor Plahte Tschudi

Printed Architecture: Treasures from the AHO Library offers an introduction to the history of the architectural publication with reference to the collection of the AHO library. Based on the “uncharted” treasures in the AHO library, the course is structured around the research and presentation of a select number of items from the collection. Choosing one item […]

Collecting Architecture: Re-inscribing the Warburg Institute

Elective, Fall 2020
Tim Anstey and Mari Lending

When the Warburg Institute was transferred from Hamburg to London in 1933 its scholars had been involved in two major architectural commissions within 10 years, one for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, a purpose designed building to house Aby Warburg’s remarkable library, another for a ground-breaking scheme for a Planetarium in Hamburg. In London this pattern of […]

Style

Elective, Spring 2019
Mari Hvattum

‘Style’ has long been a reviled concept in modern architecture. From Mies van der Rohe equating style with formalism, to Rem Koolhaas parroting Le Corbusier’s ‘The “styles” are a lie’ in his S,M,L,XL glossary, style has been viewed with suspicion by architects and historians for most of the twentieth century. The scepticism persists. Apart from a brief […]

Urban Preservation – Vestli

Elective, Spring 2019
Even Smith Wergeland and Tom Davies

2019’s Urban Preservation (UP) picks up the current buzz on late Brutalist Low Rise High Density and terraced housing projects looking at Oslo’s own Vestli; built by Selvaag Bygg (1968-78). Combining heritage preservation and working with community provides a basis for potential solutions to changes identified through workshops at Vestli carried out in 2018. These […]

Fehn, Venezia 2020

Elective, Spring 2019
Erik Langdalen and Mari Lending

Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice (1962) is a modern masterpiece in concrete, and widely acknowledged as the most striking architectural structure in Giardini, the Biennale park. Sixty years after its inauguration, the concrete is crumbling. Restoration work is underway, providing a unique opportunity to investigate the history of the pavilion. This research-based OCCAS seminar […]

Moving Monuments: Rome

Studio, Fall 2018
Victor Plahte Tschudi (course leader), Tim Anstey, Even Smith Wergeland, Mari Lending, Mari Hvattum, Eirik Arff Gulseth Bøhn and Inga Bostad

OCCAS repeats last year’s success and presents an updated version of the sudio course Moving Monuments: Rome. The course offers a study of historical monuments, tracing a selection of them through history – as well as history through its many mediations. “Moving” may refer to the actual transportation of architecture but also to the circulation and […]

The Printed and the Built

Elective, Spring 2018
Mari Hvattum

Students: Alvar Aronija, Agnete Winsnes Astrup, Palak Dudani, Alexia Kondyliou, Stian Opsal, Fredrik Rognerud, Nikolai Lieblein Røsæg, Yile Xu. The Printed and the Built was a research based elective course, studying the relationship between architecture and the popular press in the 19th century. Looking particularly at illustrated journals such as The Illustrated London News, Illustreret Nyhedsblad, and Skilling-Magazin, this […]

The Art of Collecting Architecture

Elective, Fall 2017
Mari Lending and Tim Anstey

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an influx of images of the landscapes, inhabitants and monuments of Egypt saturated European culture on an unprecedented scale. Soon, heavy physical parts of that landscape fabric were relocated to Western centres, while this like transfer, in turn, was accompanied by a flood of weightless images: newspaper reports, […]

Piranesi and the Modern Age

Elective, Fall 2017
Victor Plahte Tschudi

The elective course Piranesi and the Modern Age, taught by Victor Plahte Tschudi, takes as a point of departure the enigmatic visions of the architect, archaeologist, designer and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78). The course focuses not on Piranesi himself but on the rediscovery of him from 1900 onwards and the influence his prints had […]

Moving Monuments: Rome

Studio, Fall 2017
Victor Plahte Tschudi (course leader), Tim Anstey, Even Smith Wergeland, Mari Lending, Mari Hvattum and Inga Bostad

The OCCAS studio course Moving Monuments: Rome offers a study of historical monuments. It traces a selection of monuments through history – as well as history through its many mediations. “Moving” may refer to the actual transportation of architecture but also to the circulation and recreation of monuments in various media and materials, from print […]

Images of Egypt

Elective, Spring 2017
Tim Anstey and Mari Lending

  Ancient Egypt has kept its spell on the European mind across centuries. Since the French-British battle for control of the area during the late eighteenth century, and the massive relocation of Egyptian antiquities to European museums during the nineteenth, this interest has only increased. For two centuries, Egyptian imagery has echoed in European architecture, […]

Curating Architecture: Ten Exhibitions for a Journey into Post-war Architecture

Elective, Spring 2016
Léa-Catherine Szacka

Although architects’ graphic and textual production had been exchanged, collected and exposed since the neo-classical period, the act of ‘curating’ architecture has only been amplified in the post-war period. Indeed, in the second half of the twentieth century and up to our days, architecture exhibitions have been important testing grounds, allowing architects to discuss, expand […]

Home: The Agency of Domesticity

Elective, Fall 2015
Léa-Catherine Szacka and Mathilde S. Dahl

How does the conception of the ‘home’ transform in a situation of global migration? In relation to the theme proposed by the curators of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale (After Belonging: A Triennale In-Residence, On-Residence and the Ways We Stay In-Transit), this course aimed to investigate the notion of the ‘home’ and its spatial implications […]

The Printed and the Built

Studio, Fall 2015
Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum

In collaboration with the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, the master students have designed permanent and contemporary exhibitions in Henrik Bull’s monumental museum at Tullinløkka (1903). Based on in-depth studies of collections and display techniques, the projects present curatorial interventions emphasizing the lost spatial qualities of the galleries. The result are re-interpretations of a diversity […]

Architecture on Display

Studio, Fall 2014
Mari Hvattum

In the autumn semester 2014, two master students have been affiliated to the Printed and Built research project, designing and curating an exhibition on the Norwegian Parliament building. From 1835 to 1860, around 20 projects were made for a Norwegian Parliament building, evoking a vivid public debate regarding the building’s siting, style, and spaces. The […]

Cities in Maps and Models

Elective, Spring 2014
Victor Plahte Tschudi

The course is not about how cities change throughout history but about how maps and models change the images of cities. From antiquity to the present urban images are subjected to various rhetorical, didactic and idealizing adjustments. Utopia, reconstruction and moral exemplum count for some of the different urban categories to be examined. The material […]

Architecture on Display

Studio, Fall 2013
Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum

In collaboration with The House of the Artist, The Oslo City Archives, and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, this studio explores, interprets, curates and revives a unique collection of architectural models which today exists in a half ruinous state in the Oslo City Archives. The collection was established in 1925, planned as […]

Re-store: Alteration as a Critical Device

Studio, Spring 2013
Andreas Angelidakis and Espen Vatn

Re-Store will examine restoration as a tool for re-imagining reality. Invoking preservation and archaeological methods, we will observe the built environment as an archaeologists’ open source library of proposals, to which we can intervene and inject. We will analyze history as a design process, and create timelines of development from past to future.     […]

Architectural Fantasies: Piranesi & Co

Elective, Spring 2013
Victor Plahte Tschudi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) turned the fantastical into aesthetics. He programmed the transcendent and irrational as a norm, creating an “anti-architecture” that not only broke with established rules and conventions in building, but which have offered a corrective for architects and urban planners to this day. Graphic series like the Carceri have become metaphors of […]

The Art of Collecting Architecture

Elective, Spring 2013
Mari Lending and Wallis Miller

Architecture forms a seemingly immovable and durable presence, immutable to display and collecting. Buildings and building parts have for centuries constituted material for a lively curatorial practice, however, where buildings are disassembled and reassembled, collected and displayed. From the collecting practices of the renaissance, through the establishment of modern public museums, once site-specific art forms […]

Total Design as the Art of Transgression

Elective, Spring 2013
Anders Munch

The collaboration of art forms has remained a dream for artists, designers and architects, designed to transgress narrow boundaries, create new societies and foster an architecture that embraces a still more complex reality. The Gesamtkunstwerk or Total Work of Art has recurred to describe, critically or confirming, contemporary experiments combining design, architecture and art. The […]