A ceiling is the upper interior surface of a room. Sometimes simply the underside of the structure above (be it a roof or a floor), other times an independent membrane, the ceiling has an ambiguous tectonic status. Miming structure but rarely structural, and often with an unobvious materiality, ceilings offer an unsurpassed field for representation, […]
At the cusp of the Anthropocene, we have begun to think differently about how materials are extracted and refined, and how they might repurposed in the future. Raw materials are extracted from the world into order to build, transforming them. These processes are sometime quite complex and involve the participation of industries. Even though we […]
This new elective course surveys architectural thinking from the last two decades, looking at contradictory and complementary tendencies on the contemporary scene. Each week students and staff read and discuss texts on current themes, ranging from the many alleged “turns” in contemporary architecture, to overriding topics such as gender, identity, colonialism, and climate change. Contemporary […]
Centralteateret in Akergaten 38, Oslo is an internationally exceptional composite of theatrical architecture, and a cornucopia of time-specific expressions and ideas. Dating back to the late 18th century, its complex urban and architectural history of additions and transformation includes the work of prominent architects such as Jørgen Henrik Rawert, Georg Andreas Bull, Herman Major Backer, […]
The studio will work with the transformation of Centralteateret in the centre of Oslo. The theatre is a cultural building of complex provenance, making it an ideal case study for working with existing buildings. The first iteration of Centralteateret dates back to the late 18th century, and the theatre has since gone through several transformations. […]
As existing monuments and buildings are fought over, on one hand demanded demolished and on the other asked to be preserved, there is a pressing need to discuss the premises upon which our disciplines operate. Acknowledging that we have to reorient towards the reuse of what already exist, architectural practice has to rethink its methods, working […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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’ 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
