Centre for Space and Technique

Rom og Teknikk

Approach
The group reinterprets the old and develops new architectural strategies and tools through collaborative design and research, with particular emphasis on the experiential process of the architectural project as a working method. The studio is taught in collaboration with an invited international practitioner, whose approach is explicitly formulated in dialog with the AHO model. The relationship between this external approach and the tradition of AHO characterizes its teaching. 

​

​

Architectural Context
Architecture is a constantly-changing, millennia-old discipline that works with the most basic and primitive of concerns while maintaining a sharply contemporary sense of the possibilities inherent in its own future. While its primary goal is building things, like houses or cities, it should be designed by responding to human experience and challenging critical thought. In this way, the practice of architecture is much more than a set of skills or core of competency; it needs to integrate multiple (changing and often contradictory) concerns within a realistic whole that includes a plan for its realization. This complexity and scale is has given rise to the idea of the “project”, in which the design task as well as the human dimensions of the practitioner and the inhabitant can be explored in a structured but free way. The project is  simultaneously goal-oriented and speculative, accepting its conditions faithfully while never ceasing to expand and challenge those conditions. 

​

​

Societal Role
In line with the group’s broad understanding of the capacity of architecture to engage both the privacy of the individual and the discourse of society at large, it sees architecture as necessarily embedded within society and its conditions. Architecture can enrich society; but it cannot change it. 

​

​

Teaching Method: The Project
The constantly changing conditions that underlie architectural development require the practitioner to formulate a vision within which to study the relations of program, space, structure, materiality, performance and idea. The formulation of this vision occurs through the _architectural project_. Within a project, architects develop and defend a vision of the work in a social, artistic and critical context. Developing program, space, and structure, they assume conceptual responsibility for developing strategy and making decisions. The project forms an integrated but open environment of research into the particular conditions of the case at hand. The making of an individual architectural project is the best way to study and learn architecture. The essence of doing a project is in making decisions. Being able to make decisions as an architect means developing a vision, and making decisions based on that vision, understanding and taking responsibility for the design. The emphasis is put on critical, but imaginative thinking and on constructing a narrative for the process.

​

​

Elements
Space & Technique Collaboration approaches the project environment with the following organization:

- The studio is taught in collaboration with an invited international practitioner, whose approach is explicitly formulated in dialog with the AHO model. 
- A given architectural program is studied — one whose next solution is by definition not known. 
- Each semester, the studio researches the work of an exceptional practitioner or school, and uses this research in the discussion and design that the studio produces. 
- The studio focusses on an integral understanding of the space of the building, the tools through which its design is studied and the manner in which the results are communicated.

​

​

Research Interests
The group focuses on the contemporary landscape of architecture and its ideas. By researching the design process and the conditions that support it, it seeks to develop an ongoing discourse on selected architects and their work.