THEME

Production Dynamics:
Exploring Alternative Visions for Urban Expansion

SITE

Grønlikaia, Oslo
59°54’03.3″N 10°45’23.4″E

The Studios

Studio Leaders
Gilles Delalex (Principal)
Yves Moreau (Principal)
Quentin Moranne (Project Architect)

Design Team
Tara Jakubowskij | University of Melbourne, Australia
Eddie Zhichun Guo | University of Melbourne, Australia
Daria Gridina | Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI), Russia
Jinyuan (Harry) Wu | University of Melbourne, Australia
Sophia Haewon Lee | Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA
Lixu Zhang | University of Melbourne, Australia

Studio Brief
Factory Fusion: A Cadavre Exquis Exploration

Conducting a five-day workshop exercise for architecture students using the Cadavre Exquis methodology can be an engaging and collaborative way to explore design principles and historical influences. This exercise involves each participant contributing to the design of a building without knowledge of the overall project, resulting in a unique and unexpected collaborative creation.
The suggested workshop plan is to explore the design principles of three iconic factories (Ford River Rouge Glass Plant, AEG Factory, lnmos Microprocessor Factory)* through the Cadavre Exquis methodology, encouraging creativity, collaboration, and the synthesis of architectural ideas.
This workshop aims to foster creativity, teamwork, and an understanding of architectural evolution through the lens of iconic factories. The Cadavre Exquis methodology adds an element of surprise and collaboration, encouraging students to think outside the box and create a harmonious yet unexpected fusion of architectural elements.
*It is expected for students to research and collect data on the buildings listed before the launch of the studio.

Jette Hopp (Creative Director VS Oslo + Director at Snøhetta)

When we were devising the brief this is the type of project we had in mind. Not necessarily the project’s process but the idea of a collage analysis and therefore an exploration of what modernism and contemporary architecture learnt from industrial buildings. So, I think the project is not only beautiful and successful but provocative and ticks all the boxes of the brief.
I could imagine intensifying the metaphor of the cadaver even further by imagining that each of the building sections could be dissected into components, reshuffled into different sections and placed together as a contemporary Frankenstein. In this way an additional discussion about tectonics and program becomes valid. That depth of information is missing here, but perhaps could be addressed given more time. The design idea is extremely inspiring and could be made into a full-scale studio course.

Tommaso Maserati (Creative Director VS Oslo + Architect at Snøhetta)

Studio Leaders
Beate Hølmebakk (Founding Partner)
Per Tamsen (Founding Partner)

Design Team
Daria Khramova | Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands
Min-wei Ang | Rhode Island School of Design, USA
Ioana Davidescu | “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urbanism, Romania
Fumiya Hitomi | Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland
Luna Kim | Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA
Peiyao Xu | Aalto University, Finland

Studio Brief
Museum of Medieval History

Given: The site at Grønlikaia is situated in the center of what used to be medieval Oslo. 

Museum definition by the International Council of Museums (ICOM):
“A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible, and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection and knowledge sharing.” 

Brief: To propose a Museum for Medieval History at Grønlikaia. The proposal should also incorporate integrated landscape and public space. 

Studio Leaders
José Selgas (Principal)
Lucia Cano (Principal)

Design Team
Fernando Garrido Carreras | Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA
Xam Adan | Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), Netherlands
Umut Ekin Özyurt | Bilkent University, Turkey
Sherry Aine Te | Columbia University GSAPP, USA
Tuan Pham | University of Waterloo, Canada
David Zuniga | University of Arizona, USA

Studio Brief
Minimum Entities: The irrational part.

This workshop is first of all an opportunity for students to work in the compound of the selgascano offices and to experience the ambience and spirit of our studio. They will enjoy the mix of selgascano projects and the natural environment that surrounds the buildings of the office. We´ll show the students how the office works and functions, so they can at least leave with a small glimpse of how the things are understood and made around here.

About the workshop project itself, the students will work on the Snøhetta proposed location in the Oslo harbour. Our initial purpose is to deal with the whole area, making all together a single project. For that intent, to fully occupy that huge area we´ll divide the lot in different parts, one each per student – each student will have the freedom to work alone on their fragment but knowing, at the end, they will unite for a common proposal that is to be presented by the team at the Final Review.

The very specific way of working will be related to the proposed theme: Minimum Entities: The irrational Part. Students will work with materials, pieces and objects, to develop an entity based on the idea of the Minimum: minimum material, minimum consumption, minimum economy. But not related to minimal or minimalism. On the contrary we´ll encourage students in the search for irrational shapes and irrational functions, something in fact completely opposite to the other side of the harbour, where everything is planned and developed very rationally and in a very typical way. These entities will be submerged in a green landscape world that is expanding nearby on the natural mountain. Projects don´t need to be camouflaged relative to the greenery, but on the contrary, the final forms and colours have to be very irrational and free.

Last, but not least, we encourage the students to work in a way that nowadays they are not very used to: only making pieces, mock ups and models with their hands, taking pictures later of their work, avoiding any use of 3D modelling and renderings, but simple retouches on Photoshop.

Everything in a homemade spirit that somehow is relating to the unique environment where they are going to work.

Studio Leaders
Jonathan Lazar (Co-founder)
with Gabriele Capobianco, Edoardo Capuzzo Dolcetta, Damiano Ranaldi (Co-founders)

Design Team
Ayan Shirinova | Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy
Juan Pablo Caso | Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina
Boya Zhou | Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA
Alessandro Leonardi | Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy
Aaron Gonzalez | University of California, Berkeley, USA
Hyunjung Yoon | Ewha Womans University, South Korea

Studio Brief
The Enclosed Garden (Hortus Conclusus)

In post-industrial cities, housing has been the main development type within the built environment. Several functions such as public facilities and office buildings have been undoubtedly integrated, but when it comes to define a mixed masterplan for a bustling city, planners and architects usually boost the presence of amenities such as bars, restaurants and retail. Even though Starbucks – the third place – can probably be defined as a productive space, production has been removed from the city center. Furthermore, industrial premises within our cities have been devoted to other purposes. Hence, production has been delocalized either to the outskirts or preferably halfway around the world.
How can we encourage production in the city center? How can we integrate productive premises within the urban fabric? Could we expose and celebrate production?
Although the theme does not suggest reintroducing heavy industry back into the city, it does imply the invention of a neighborhood able to propel proactive proximities, circular economies and ways to share facilities and production means. Housing has to be included, in order not to leave the area empty when everyone goes home for the night. Furthermore, we claim that home-workplace proximity should be encouraged in order to produce more sustainable cities.
Introducing production within the city improves the process of hybridization between local and global economies and creates new opportunities for more recycling, social interactions and urbanity.

The Enclosed Garden (hortus conclusus in Latin) will be a guiding reference for our design of Grønlikaia. Starting from this premise; program, content and scale will be defined during the design process and developed together in a collaborative way.

Studio Leaders
Christine Chang (Associate Director)
Chris Chen (Associate Director)

Design Team
Hazem Bassal | Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Qianhui Li | RMIT, Australia
Wendy Lin | University of Melbourne, Australia
Zonglei Mao | University of Melbourne, Australia
Sagar Rajopadhye | Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, India
Sok In Ho | University of Pennsylvania, USA

Studio Brief
Thresholds: A Productive Space of Social Exchange

The threshold simply denotes an in-between realm where two conjoined but separate spaces meet, and it also connotes transitions and boundaries between cultures, traditions, and histories. The studio will build on these notions of the threshold, and further investigate how the concept of liminality—when suspended between theory and practice, faraway places and one’s own home, fiction and reality, projection and reception—can be a productive framework for design.

The studio will work together on a hybrid hostel + second-hand furniture exchange + community center, where travelers, their craft and personal artifacts begin to shape and inform the architectural intervention. This hybrid program will host travelers and locals who wish to lodge as temporary guests; artists/craftsmen in residence; it will also provide workshops for furniture-making and repairs, while serving as showrooms for second-hand furniture pieces; emerging from these spaces for itinerant people and objects of domesticity will be a new community center that celebrates the divergent cultures and histories of Oslo.

The design process of the studio will approximate the flow of travelers and goods in the brief, where each studio participant will contribute an autobiographical imprint to the collaboration, while allowing these memorabilia to become part of the ongoing, open-ended design. The theme of the threshold also hints at the notion of the other, and the studio’s crossing and re-crossing of such liminal realms will attempt to reflect on our own selves and the disharmony/incompatibility of the different spatial and temporal worlds as we so-often discover in our travels. Students will test how proposed hybrid programs can interface with each other while also exploring how program contradictions and tensions may produce unexpected moments of social encounter. It may be helpful for students to probe the specificities of daily rituals within a hostel and the second-hand market program – bathing, sleeping, lounging, socializing, etc to generate an architectural response to facilitate the idiosyncrasies of human inhabitation.

The final output of the studio will be a series of experimental drawings, collages and visuals that reveal the iterative and collaborative process behind their creation by all members of the studio.  Students encouraged to exploit and challenge conventional and hybrid representational mediums through drawings and modeling, both in 2D and 3D, analog and digital, still and moving.