The diploma semester at AHO is an independent research and design task on a theme chosen by the candidate. In consultation with a chosen advisor, the candidate is to produce a complete work of exceptional quality contributing to the discipline’s dis-course.

Norwegian Landscape Architecture has lately produced a range of projects with high quality in a growing discipline and profession. With its focus on geography, the history of landscape architecture, paradigm shift, people’s health the subject has grown into an important discipline for urbanism’s latest design practices. Students will be introduced to landscape architecture's broad scope. As well as how its methods and theories the past years have been more and more important due to increasing problems in the world. Landscape architecture has the tools to solve many of these problems. The students will follow landscape architecture2discourse and design practices, through site and office visits in Oslo.

Professor in charge: 

Rainer Stange

Additional staff: 

Elisabeth Ulrika Sjødahl, Sabine Muller, Luis Callejas and Giambattista Zaccariotto Åsa von Malortie, Erik Brand Dam, Iwan Thomson

The course explores ideas and techniques of a landscape oriented approach to urbanism, a rich field of knowledge for interpretation / modification of cities and territories which identity is related to the palimpsest of traces overlaid throughout history. Detecting their meaning and illustrating their potentials is the task of the designer. Scope of the course is improving the interpretative toolkit of the designer as `reflective practitioner´.

The contemporary city, with its processes of upscaling and rapid mutation that question the very idea of a city. Geographers have described the changing configurations of European and global urbanization. Many terms have been coined to describe urban forms emerged in different parts of Europe and elsewhere during the 20th and 21st century: Ville-Territoire (Corboz, 1990), the Citta Diffusa (Indovina, 1990), the Desakota (McGee, 1991), the Radiant Periphery (Smets 1986), the Zwischenstadt (Sieverts, 1997). These concepts are diverse, coming from different perspectives with different methods and case studies. But there are shared themes: build-up areas and open space areas that intertwine over vast regions - with the dissolution of clear distinction between city and country- and the formation of mixed whole that used in all parts.

Urban form and process create critical aesthetic, environmental, social conditions that are related, increasing uncertainty. Conventional urbanism repertoire is limited. How can a project absorb present contradictions by creating new, meaningful physical orders? Landscape architecture, a heterogeneous field of knowledge that embrace garden, horticulture, public spaces as well as agriculture, civil and military engineering, cartography and town planning, offers a set of tools - conceptual and operative – that allows for disclosing new possibilities for an integrated approach (transdisciplinary, multifunctional, multi-scalar and processual).

In most of its traditional variations, the `landscape’ is seen as the discipline of interpretation of the existing situation meanings or identities which it will be the designer’s task to detect, to underline, to enhance, to articulate or modulate.  Landscape reading views the area and the public space as a land of ancient culture or as a palimpsest which has accumulated traces of all activities which are remembered as having contributed to that particular landscape and no other. In the tracks which have been overlaid by the march of time, which contradicting or corroborating one another, it construes intentions and detects potentialities to be nursed and passed on (Marot 2010).

Interpretation leads to new forms of description and prefiguration. As cultural construct, landscape is made and remade. The interpretation of landscapes imply - using the terms of Umberto Eco - the distinction between the “intentionality of the author”, that is what the designer wants to communicate; the intentionality of the “reader”, that is what the user interpret and use. And the “intentionality of the work itself”, that is what - independently from the intentionality of the author – the constructed landscape suggests remaining open to new interpretations.

The aim of the studio is to address the topic of how to create a campus for AHO, in connection  with the existing landscape and the city, by designing small scale interventions, to facilitate new  use of the campus. Today, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design is situated in an area with a complex  natururban tissue, integrating a wide range of programs and activities, structures and  infrastructures, with many stakeholders and interests. There is a need to reimagine how the  school relates, interacts, and contributes to define, its environment. The studio seeks to contextualise the site in its surroundings, taking on both a contemporary and  historical view. We explore how human presence and natural forces have changed the landscape  throughout time, and take into account the complexity of the interplay between historical  forces,structures and elements. Using our understanding for an ever changing landscape as a  premise, we design solutions for public spaces, that in addition to having a historical perspective,  integrate the aspect of future sustainability. We will experiment with hypothesises for what  characterizes concepts that are valuable over time, that integrate site-specifics, seasonal cycles,  and achieves significant impact through small scale design intervention.    

In 1933, Akerselva was the first area to be regulated as a water park in Oslo, by landscape  architect and city gardener Marius Røhne. Today, the park area is widely used by the inhabitants  of Oslo, all throughout the year. The area referred to as ​Campus Akerselva​, is comprised of the  areas between; and tangent to; the three university level educational institutions located just north  of the Vulkan Complex. The institutions mentioned are the Oslo School of Architecture and Design  (since 2002), Oslo Art Academy (2010), and Westerdals School of Communication (2011). Despite 
the three schools being located closely together, and with overlapping and related disciplines,  there is little to no sense of a campus tying the institutions together. AHO has recently initiated a new five year program for Landscape Architecture, the upcoming  curriculum for which will be in need of more outdoor spaces and testing grounds for studio work,  projects, and big scale landscape models. An assessment of opportunities has been conducted  to map potential avenues of development, aimed at addressing these needs, as well as general  development of the school, the shared campus, and the school surroundings. 

Can weather be made?

Ever since the balancing of seasonal differences and geographical allocation of resources has been the driver of cultural intelligence. The creation of microclimates, through modifications of ground, planting and architectures; prolongations of blooming and growing periods; the harvest, storage, and conservation of resources has led to what we call cultural landscapes and practice. Human societies actively manipulate temperature, humidity and air flow. Societies have specific agency in modifying ecological metabolisms. In this web of dependencies water plays a centre role.

Why should it be made in the Oslo Area?

Historically a water-rich area, weather extremes and so-called seasonal abnormalities question the functionality of cultural landscapes present in the Oslo region. While flooding and its impact on traffic, real estate and water quality in intensively used areas start to be addressed in municipal planning, recently occurring droughts shift attention to water supply and agriculture - and with it to the rather extensively used, wider “support” territory. From a weather perspective, the levelling of peaks is a need and calls for new landscapes and architectures. 

Greater Oslo is a growing region. With increasing urbanisation, urban-rural relationships are being redefined, often at the cost of landscape heritage. The need to make weather could be taken as a kick-off to re-imagine the region beyond inevitably short-falling city-nature dichotomies. 

The heart of the region is the Oslo Fjord. Urbanisation patterns encircle the Inner Fjord, weather stability is provided by its water body. It is itself a product of a changing climate and whilst retreating to its current form it has left behind the fertile sediments of the ancient sea. The Fjord City is always also an agricultural city. 

How to act summer, how to walk rain?

In this context, the studio is a call for the imagination of Greater Oslo as an urban-rural pattern in which weather conditions and the mediation of seasonal disparities are consciously designed. It is a call for architectural corner stones and landscape typologies to frame the fjord and its agricultural hinterland as heart of a weather-active and climate-adaptive urbanity. Taking on the mindset of an agronomist cultivating the land for returning yields, and geared to a wide range of actors and stakeholders, the studio will conceive publicly meaningful places, that stitch an idea of region across the sound. 

In search for exploitation of the almost inexhaustible atmospheric and social potentials of water for the enhancement of the urban landscape’s quality, and with the aim of re-positioning the hydrosphere towards a fundamental role in planning, the studio will explicitly explore how weather can both be a structuring and a productive element within a socially conceived territory, and envision landscapes, architectures and a series of figures that act within, mark and organize the wider field of territorial flows while, as Vittorio Gregotti would demand, “giving meaning to the whole environment through its stronger characterization and definition”. 

The pre-diploma semester at AHO is an independent research task on a theme chosen by the candidate. In consultation with the course teacher, fellow students and a chosen advisor, the candidate is to produce a report that details a topic to be studied, an approach or methodology, a spatial program and a plan of work. This report is the foundation of the diploma work.