Oslo Architecture Triennale: The Latest Architecture and News

After two years of disrupted cycles of architecture events, due to the pandemic, 2022 has been witnessing a resurgence: biennials, triennials, design weeks, and festivals are back in the picture, with bigger interrogations and larger thematic approaches, aligned with the challenges of the world.

Relevant today more than ever, these happenings scattered around the globe are tackling climate-related issues, urban problems, as well as concerns engendered by covid-19 such as resilience, models of living, future of design, and the unknown.

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Oslo Architecture Triennale 2022 spotlights the neighborhood as a place and horizon for rethinking our cities. With the working title Mission Neighbourhood—(Re)forming Communities, the Triennale explores how we form the places that we share. Mission Neighbourhood is an invitation to broaden the collective imagination regarding the spaces of everyday life.

In a time when the world is facing major social and environmental challenges, Oslo Architecture Triennale 2022 spotlights the neighborhood as a place and horizon for rethinking our cities. With the working title Mission Neighborhood – (Re)forming communities, the Triennale will explore how we form the places we share.

Exhibited in Oslo Architecture Museum from 26th of October to 24th of November 2019 for the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale (ab)Normal will focus on the existing relationship with the city of Oslo and the automation processes that our rapidly intersecting our path. As part of an on-going research by (ab)Normal with Ludwig Engel, Oslo will be here depicted through a different lens, highlighting several aspects that are yet to come and raising awareness of others that are already within us.

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Already in its 7^th edition, the Oslo Architecture Triennale opened this week, exploring “the architecture of a radically transformed society in which cultural and ecological flourishing matter more than economic growth”. Under the title of Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth, the festival is questioning the damage caused to the environment by the constant economic growth.

Around the world campaigners, cities, and governments are declaring a state of emergency in response to accelerating global warming. Meanwhile systemic inequality continues to entrench deep divides between those who have far too little, and those who have far too much. In this unprecedented moment, an urgent question is cast into relief: how should architecture respond to a time of climate emergency and social division?

As part of the programming ahead of the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale, the “Degrowth” curatorial team have released a book in association with Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO.) The book, titled “Being Tectonic” was developed with students as part of a course focusing on domestic architecture.

Planning can, on occasion, feel Sisyphean. Emerging technologies, shifting economies, and changing governments can all enact dramatic and unpredictable change in short order. So what’s the use of planning for the future, let alone planning for a future nearly half a century away?

The engine of contemporary architectural production, and the basis of societies around the world, is economic growth. Global political orthodoxy declares GDP growth is always good; that more is more. Throughout the last two centuries increased economic growth brought with it many measures of prosperity, but for many decades now the limits to growth have been visible on the horizon. Social equity, health and wellbeing, quality of life, happiness and other non-monetary measures of success are faltering while resource extraction, greenhouse gas emissions, waste and toxicity, temperatures, sea levels, extreme weather, and many such indicators of climate breakdown make clear daily that the time of this worldview is running out.

The Oslo Architecture Triennale has announced the winner of the open call for Chief Curator of their 2019 event: Architecture and Engineering practice Interrobang (Maria Smith and Matthew Dalziel), with critic Phineas Harper and urban researcher Cecilie Sachs Olsen.

The winning team’s proposal, entitled Common Futures, seeks to acknowledge and investigate the “need to revise the pace and scale of extraction, production, consumption, development, and building that has driven the growth of industrialized societies and economies throughout the 20th century.”

This fall, the Oslo Architecture Triennale had an open call for its 2019 curator. Now, they have announced the five proposals which have been shortlisted for 2017. Upon reading their bios below, you will quickly see the amount of multidisciplinary work each of the shortlisted teams is composed of, including architects, curators, writers, and various other thought-leaders.

Videos

Following After Belonging, the sixth edition of the Oslo Architecture Triennale held in 2016, the Norwegian organization have today announced an open call for a Chief Curator, theme, and concept for its seventh edition, to be held in Fall of 2019. In the words of the sixth curatorial team:

The Triennale is an opportunity and space to rehearse research strategies and test working protocols which offer new forms of engagement for architects. We considered "After Belonging" and the Oslo Architecture Triennale not only as a 10-week event, but rather as a long-term collective research project that resulted in new forms of thought and action.

In this film, presented in collaboration with +KOTE, the After Belonging Agency—Carlos Minguez Carrasco, Ignacio Galán, Alejandra Navarrese Llopis, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, and Marina Otero Verzier—narrate a walkthrough of In Residence, one of the two core exhibitions at this year's Oslo Architecture Triennale: After Belonging – A Triennale In Residence, On Residence, and the Ways We Stay in Transit.

In the latest edition of Section D, Monocle 24's weekly review of design, architecture and craft, Henry Rees-Sheridan visits Oslo to speak to Hanna Dencik Petersson, Director of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, and Alejandra Navarrete Llopis and Ignacio González Galán – two members of its curatorial team, the After Belonging Agency. The show explores the concept behind the exhibitions of the Triennale, what it means to be located in Norway's capital, and how the event's trajectory is both a symptom and cause of Oslo’s development as a design city. ArchDaily's James Taylor-Foster weighs in on After Belonging's significance.

“Belonging,” the curatorial quintet of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, After Belonging, argue, “is no longer something bound to one’s own space of residence, or to the territory of a nation.” For this group of Spanish-born architects, academics and theorists—Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Ignacio Galán, Carlos Minguez Carrasco, Alejandra Navarrese Llopis and Marina Otero Verzier—the very notion of our belongings and what it means to belong is becoming increasingly unstable.

After Belonging is the sixth incarnation of the Triennale and the first one in which a single curatorial thread has woven all of the festival’s activities together, including the international conference. The goal of the two primary exhibitions—On Residence and In Residence, including a series of Intervention Strategies—is to develop platforms with the aim of “rehearsing research strategies,” providing new ways for architects to engage with “contemporary changing realities."