Oslo: The Latest Architecture and News

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The student architecture competition “120 Hours” has released the winners of its 2016 competition—“What Ever Happened to Architectural Space?”—which this year challenged entrants to imagine a space without program or site. In a time when the discourse of architecture is influenced more by program and environment than spatial quality, the brief was uniquely challenging in its simplicity. Entries were received from over 2863 students from 72 countries, with winners selected by a jury headed by Christian Kerez and including Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Beate Hølmebakk, Neven Mikac Fuchs and Marina Montresor.

Originally devised by students in Oslo, the competition format is intended as a way of encouraging discourse among architecture students across the world, with competition briefs released just 120 hours (5 days) before the submission deadline. These unique restrictions have fostered a reputation for unconventional and challenging proposals and winning entries in the past have included giant scaffolds of hammocks and the use of robots to inhabit an abandoned town. Read on to see the top three award recipients for 2016.

Though architectural history is replete with bricks, stones, and steel, there is no rule that states that architecture must be ‘solid’. Sverre Fehn, one of the most prominent architects of postwar Norway, regularly made use of heavy materials like concrete and stone masonry in his projects [1]. In this way, his proposal for the Nordic Pavilion at the Osaka World Expo in 1970 could be seen as an atypical exploration of a more delicate structure. Representing a very different aspect of ‘Modernity’ than his usual work, Fehn’s “breathing balloon” pavilion stands not only in contradiction to Fehn’s design canon, but to that of traditional architecture as a whole.

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Following an international open call for 'Intervention Strategies' which connect and correspond to the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale’s theme—After Belonging—five proposals have been selected to be developed as part of its core program, to be displayed and discussed throughout the course of the event. The jury have been "pleased and impressed by the wide range of proposals, their creativity, seriousness and sometimes also the humor with which [the submissions] approach issues of real gravity, and by the care and hard work that was evident in almost all of them."

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schmidt hammer lassen architects has won an international competition to masterplan a 87,000-square-meter area of Skøyen in central Oslo, dubbed Eureka Kvarteret. The multi-phased plan aims to unify the area's connection to the Oslo fjord, nearby transportation hubs and its main street, Hoff, while generating a versatile new skyline that compliments its context.

“We have proposed a framework that builds upon a basic idea about the space between the buildings," explains Senior Partner Kristian Lars Ahlmark.

The 2016 Oslo Triennale – After Belonging: A Triennale In Residence, On Residence and the Ways We Stay in Transit – has launched a call for intervention strategies and associated projects. To be held from September 8- November 27, 2016, the Triennale will look at contemporary population mobility—including an interest in migration, new forms of tourism and refugeesim— with the intention of designing “the objects, spaces and territories for a transforming condition of belonging.” Specifically, it seeks to answer the questions: “How can different agents involved in the built environment address the ways we stay in transit?” And, “how can architects intervene in the reconfiguration of the contemporary residence?"

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