I just moved out of my apartment! Currently sitting in a coffee shop with ALL of my crap waiting to move it to a friends apartment. Finally catching up on a mountain of e-mails that have accumulated. Pictures will happen eventually.
To all my fans, sorry for ignoring you. I just presented my studio project. Tomorrow we have one exam. Maybe I will get to update this a little bit then.
2Aug2011 - 1113 CEST
As I sit here in studio, working and reworking my roof plan, I’m also thinking about all of the thing I thought I hated, but that the Danes are making me reconsider.
It’s not a tremendous list (in terms of length or content), but here it is:
1) Jorts
2) Tank tops
3) Salmon
And for me, those are actually pretty big deals.
We just got back from a 3 day tour through western Denmark (Aarhus and Kolding), but I wanted to post some photos of my studio project. As mentioned earlier, we’re working on a pavilion/fish market for Norrebro, a suburb northwest of Copenhagen City. I’m working on two sibling pavilions that loosely adhere to the idea of streams/currents of water. I’m focusing a lot on the roofing condition in trying to keep the pavilion simple and geometric in plan while being expressive and soft in section/elevation.
The sun finally made an appearance today, after 4 straight days of rain and clouds. Conveniently, we also only had one lecture scheduled for this morning! A few of us took advantage of these facts, ignored the need to spend time in studio and biked to the beach!
We hit up Amager, an island southeast of Copenhagen City. Our destination was the Kastrup Sea Bath, a project by White Architects out of Sweden (obviously, we couldn’t just go to any old beach; we had to go to an architecturally significant beach). Sea/harbor baths are a common thing here - they are simple structures on natural bodies of water that attract locals, families, and tourists alike to enjoy the natural, clean water Denmark has surrounding it.
The Kastrup bath is basically an extended pier, wrapped around in a circle, with varying levels for seating/nature viewing. Little island decks also dotted the water in and around the main structure. There were even two platforms to jump off of! I couldn’t help but wonder why we don’t have these things in America…
The water was pretty chilly, but it felt great to lay out in the sun. My skin was yearning for some warmth after wearing fleeces and layers and raincoats for the past few days. It was a nice 3 hour break from school to enjoy the local sites.
Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that we stopped by PLOT’s (BIG + JDS) Maritime Youth House on the way (http://www.archdaily.com/11232/maritime-youth-house-plot/). SO COOL, and so simple.
Day 6: Our first day of rain messed with our plans, but we still hit all of our sites.
We began at the city hall. It was a massive building, built in the early 20th century. I was surprised how non-Scandinavian it looked. Many of the details had a middle-eastern flair to them that I haven’t seen elsewhere around. A fun surprise around the backside of it was a massive sarcophagus holding the remains of the man who founded Stockholm (of course, I forget his name). Also from where the sarcophagus was you could look across the water to an excellent view of Gamla Stan, in addition to a newer hotel/conference center building by White Architects (one of the more famous Swedish firms practicing today).
Next up was the Stadsbibliotek by Erik Gunnar Asplund. I was particularly excited to visit this site because my good friend Hana studied/drew/modelled it this past semester in our Analytic Model class. I felt like I knew it so well already after all of her presentations! It was a lovely building to behold, but the inside was slightly underwhelming. I was bothered my the (surprising) lack of natural light brought in by one large skylight in the main volume, as well as an odd texture that the walls were rendered in. I expected the overall feel to be slightly more refined. And another funny detail - the building is placed on a plinth that rises above the road. Along the front edge of the plinth, retail spaces were made available to liven the street. So in the base of this historic monument, what retailers had moved into the space? A shwarma joint and a McDonalds. DISAPPOINTMENT.
The sun came out as we arrived at Markus Kyrkan, a brick church by Sigurd Lewerentz. It was a pretty small church, but it was quite intriguing in it’s construction details. First, the plan/form included many curves. Usually, curves are made in brick buildings by shaving off the edges of each brick to produce curved walls. However in this church, Lewerentz felt strongly about the idea of whole bricks (something to do with whole people in the congregation, or each member being important for their entirety). Thus, the curves are a result of the mortar between the bricks rather than the bricks themselves. Also, the windows of the nave are made such that no frame can be seen from the inside. Although this is a contractor’s nightmare, for someone inside the church it translates to clean opening’s the walls and shapes of lights.
Our final (and seemingly never ending) stop of the day was the Woodland Cemetery, also by Asplund and Lewerentz in a team. On the grounds of the cemetary stands the Woodland Chapel, the Resurrection Chapel, the Holy Cross Chapel, a crematorium and several more religious spaced. I found the grounds of cemetery breath-taking, but the architecture underwhelming. Half of the grounds were covered in a dense, lush forest that provided a beautiful, intimate atmosphere. From previous knowledge of the buildings on site, I expected to be blown away. Our tour guide kept mentioning details about the rooms such as the arrangement of furniture or placement of coatracks that made the already mundane spaces seems like merely a collection of convenient details.
By leaving the Woodland cemetery, we ended the formal part of our day. We had a few moments to hang around the hotel, but our tour guides had planned a group dinner for us. We ate a small restaurant in the heart of Gamla Stan, and there I had my first, most legitimate Swedish meal! It included meatballs with lingenberry and cucumber, potatoes, and more. Needless to say, DIS lived up to their trend of providing high quality food. After dinner, were recommended to stay downtown for a small concert at a local bar. Most of the group stayed and those who didn’t surely missed out on a highlight of the whole trip. The concert was at an open air, indoor/outdoor bar underneath a prominent bridge connecting the Old city with the surrounding islands. The band we say, Young Dreams (http://soundcloud.com/youngdreams) really surprised us. They were composed, professional sounding, and catchy to boot. I thoroughly, thoroughly encourage everyone to click the link I attached. You will thank me.
Our last day of the trip was spent mostly on the bus (8+ hours). We made two quick stops - one at Hammerby Sjostod and the other at Lofstad Slott. Hammerby is a new sustainable development in Stockholm with a myriad of environmental ideas being tested. Some include recycling education classes, storm water control, and many more. Walking around, I was please to see the variety of people who lived there. It really showed that sustainability was for all ages! Our stop for lunch took place at a refurbished castle called Lofstad Slott. Not much to say about it - good food, and i don’t remember anything because I was so tired from the concert the night before!
BOOOOOOOM, finally finished blogging about the trip. Now tomorrow I just need to get you up to speed with the week since we returned.
Out.
-SS
TIME TO TALK ABOUT SWEDEN!
We left Oslo on the morning of Wednesday the 13th. Before crossing the border, we made a quick stop at a small church just outside the metropolitan district. The Mortensrud Kirke, by Jensen and Skodvin, turned out to be a highlight of the trip. The structure was formally simple, but very complex and poetic in it’s manipulation of light and honesty with it’s structure. The most interesting (and one of my favorite) moments in the space was it’s use of drystack stone as a light-enabling screen, rather than a more tradition light-blocking screen. Around the main nave, towards the tops of the walls, the stone was stacked loosely in front of sheet glass panels so that it filtered the light into the dark space. Speaking to the structural honesty, the architects made no attempt to hide the support beams. Along the perimeter, bare diagonal buttresses partitioned the seating pews from passageways and the foyer space. Third, the church was built on a sort of natural bedrock. The architects allowed this material to permeate the floor, so that in several spots you would be standing on rough, uneven boulders rather than smooth, re-inforced concrete. In a particularly religious pun, the pulpit itself was placed on top of the largest rock (queue St. Peter’s reference).
On our long ride across the border from Norway to Sweden, we stopped at the Laxholmen Lars Lerin, a small art gallery in a refurbished warehouse in the Swedish countryside. The museum displayed the work of Lars Lerin, a watercolorist. Without going into too much detail, I must say that the work was sublime. Apologies to the YCBA, but JMWTurner has a serious competitor in my mind. The range of color and mood in the paintings was uncanny. Playing to my love of multiples/mass amounts of things/accumaltion, there were several pieces that cataloged different objects - books, houses - and aggregated them to create beautiful textures across the paper.
We had plenty of time to see the museum and check out the surrounding area, which included another abandoned (and artfully graffitied) warehouse (where everyone naturally flocked too first), and a waterfall/river that you could climb down to. The sun was out without a cloud in the sky, so everyone ended up sunbathing for the last hour or so we were there.
We continued onto our lodging for the night. On the bus, we were told that we were staying in a remodeled manor house / adjacent jailhouse, so we didn’t expect much. But then we pulled up to the most adorable little complex of buildings in the countryside. It looked like it should have been the label to a dairy container - quaint manor home, rolling hills, wheat, cows grazing in the background, A LAKE, etc. The intended perk of this stop was also our first scandinavian sauna experience. We quickly unloaded our luggage, threw on our bathing suits and ran down to the lake. We took turns sauna-ing and swimming, with some canoeing and sunbathing mixed in. After several hours, we remembered that dinner was also included (it’s not hard to loose track of time when the sun sets around 10:3) so we headed back to the manor house. Were treated to an amazing 3 course meal (which I know forget exactly what it was, but included steak and some sort of accompanying potato pie/pastry). Post-dinner, we hoped to play a huge game of capture the flag in the fields next to our inn, but our profs demanded that we hold a sketchbook review/discussion. Unfortunately, this lasted for the rest of the evening and exhausted all of us, so we headed to bed (around 12:30, with the sun down but the sky still barely past a cobalt blue color and yellow around the horizon).
(photo taken at midnight)
To jump start the next morning, a few of us decided to take a morning dip in the lake. Obviously, it was freezing, but a nice idea/memory to take away. It makes me want a lake near wherever I live in the future..
Finally, it was off to Stockholm. We started with a jam-packed day: Gamla Stan (the medieval heart of the city), the Arkitekturmuseet, Moderna Museet (modern art), and the Kulturhuset. In Gamla Stan, our professor Bo took us on a walking tour/serial sketching exercise focusing on the historical parts of island (side note: Stockholm is an archipelago connected through bridges/tunnel/etc, and Gamla Stan is the smallest island in the middle).
At the arkitekturmuseet (by Rafael Moneo), there was an excellent exhibit on public space, complete with a lovely gallery set up:
Connected to the Arkitekturmuseet was the Moderna museet, featuring a large collection of surrealist paintings (awesome) and a temporary exhibit of photography (not so awesome, and rather uncomfortable). Although the poor exhibit was remedied by a (you guessed it) perfect bookstore. Yes, I wanted everything from the books to the millions of colored pens to the wooden sunglasses I found there. It’s really too bad books weigh so much.
We then had the night to ourselves. Luckily, the cost of living in Stockholm is much less than Oslo. This fact made finding dinner a much easier task.
(cute ducks, Gamla Stan in the background)
(scale model of Stockholm at the Kulturhuset)
Phew, I’m tired. I’ll finish this post tomorrow. Then I get to catch you up on what I’ve been doing since we got back to CPH.
PEACE.
We awoke bright and early the next day to start what would become my favorite day of the trip. We boarded the bus and left for Hammar, a small city north of Oslo. There, we visited the Hedmarksmuseet, a cultural and historical museum in the town.
The museum has an interesting history. It is set on the site of medieval ruins. In the 15th century, some group of people (I forget who) attacked the original medieval complex, leaving as merely a series of shattered walls. Later, farmers in the town appropriated the ruins into a barn. The complex existed as that for several hundred years, until recently. In the mid-1970s, Sverre Fehn (Norway’s most famous architect, Pritzker Prize winner in 1997) remodeled the space and turned it into a museum preserving the town’s history.
“Remodel” is probably the wrong word for what Fehn did to the complex. He left much of the ruins/barn in place, and created a series of ramps through the existing structure that allowed viewers to glimpse the “historical footpaths” (Fehn’s own words) in a respectful manner. His execution was sublime. Fehn exhibited an incredible sense of material, only adding minimal concrete and natural wood to the existing building. Also, the connections between the new pieces and the old were exquisite and delicate - huge wooden columns would reduce to small metal brackets gently place into the stone ruins, sheet glass was merely laid over opening (no sealant or anything) to preserve the ruin’s edge conditions.
I had read about the museum before, but words don’t do it justice. Seeing it in person was definitely a highlight of the trip. The museum was also set on a peninsula, so we got to spend some time outside on the beach. We walked down to the sure, and were surprisingly met by some nude sun bathers. NBD. It’s Norway.
I also should mention the amazing gourmet lunch we had at the museum: a sort of roast beef sandwich with bacon and delicious potatoes on the side. Divine.
After getting back on the bus, we drove back to Oslo and to a new building, the Holmenkollen Ski Jump. This is a ski-jumping structure designed by JDS architects that has quickly become the nation’s pride. It was build on the site of an older ski jump (side note: ski jumping is a huge nordic past time). Definitely google it. Interesting facts about it: the structure is a huge cantilever, so it is build more like a bridge than a building. Also, it’s set in the hills north of Oslo so when you stand on the top of it, you get gorgeous views of the downtown area and harbor.
DAY THREE
This was our free day. We got to “choose our own adventure”. I packed a lot in, because I wanted to make the most of it (also, I wanted to stick with one of the DIS interns because they would pay admission to all of the museums). We started at the Norske Folkemuseet. Honestly, it was so boring. It was basically the same thing as the Danish Open air museum I had seen 3 weeks earlier (period houses/barns/ etc reconstructed in a large field / a zoo for museums). But we got to take a nice ferry across the harbor to get there. Afterwards, we checked out the Nobel Peace Center. Pretty interesting; it had an exhibition of refugees (did you know that internally displaced persons are different from refugees? i didn’t). We then took a loooooong walk to the Design and Architecture Center. Disappointingly, it was just an old warehouse with one exhibit (on wind turbines as potential archi-tourism/archi-housing). But, it did have one of the best bookstores I’ve ever seen attached to it.
By that point, the day was only half over. We headed to a massive sculpture park in the middle of the city. I don’t remember the name, but it was covered in nude statues. Check the photos:
Finally, we visited the Villa Stenerson by Arne Korsmo. Tucked into the suburbs of Oslo, the house is a prime example of white modernism and functionalism from the early 20th century. Despite the strong historical and theoretical principals the house was built on, I absolutely hated it. I totally understand Functionalism was such a hated movement by people outside of the profession. The bedrooms were too small, the bathroom was too big, and the house was noisy and uncomfortable. It did have a very nice porch/cantilevered area of a driveway, and it offered another great view of the city but overall I was unimpressed. We also had the MOST apathetic tour guide ever. She was a mousy art historian who seemed annoyed to get stuck working as a house guide. She also spoke very quietly.
Day three ended uneventfully with a weird dinner in the city. Then sleepy time before heading to Sweden the next day. More on that after the break!
Our study tour through Norway and Sweden began at the lovely time of 3:15 pm on Saturday, July 9th. That day marked the first time I got to sleep in past 7 am since my first day in CPH. We met the bus at a square outside of the city center, and then we departed!
Our first stop was the DFDS Ferry terminal. We knew we were taking a ship overnight to Oslo, but we were unsure of the quality/class of the vessel. BUT, we were in luck because what was called a ferry was much more of a cruise ship. Aside from the obvious cramped bunking conditions, we had a phenomenal time with dinner/drinks/dancing all together as a group. We even decided to take a dip in the ships pool around 1:30/2 am! One of our studio professors was outside with us, but we unfortunately couldn’t persuade him to come swimming with us.
Once arriving in Oslo, we dropped our stuff at the hotel before heading out to our first site. On the Oslo waterfront, there is a new-ish development called Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen. This is a wildly successful planning project that brought a series of high profile firms (Renzo Piano included!) to downtown Oslo. Then we dropped by the Nasjonalmuseet Arkitektur (you can guess what that is) before heading to the Opera House.
The Opera House (Den Norske Opera & Balletr) was a huge highlight of the trip. It’s a fairly new building, designed and built by the norwegian firm Snohetta. It’s meant to look like an iceberg rising out from the water. It’s an incredible piece of architecture because it unites an entire city and brings them together to a site. The building itself is very modern in design, and acts as a public space for all people. You can do much more than sit and walk in front and inside of it; you can walk up and around and on top of it as well. The outside is clad in a gorgeous white marble, with some glass along the front. This glass allows a second (interior) facade to emerge at night time. 
The inside is dominated by a wood-clad series of ramps (reminiscent of the guggenheim) that houses the actual theater space. The theater was surprisingly small. It was very dark, warm and cozy - it was built in a dark stained wood throughout. Additionally, we got a guided tour of all the supporting facilities: backstage, rehearsal rooms, costume departments, offices, etc. It was truly a tremendous facility
After the Opera house, we had the evening free for dinner and relaxing. I found a cheap cheap indian buffet (i know, i know…but the cost of normal/local food was INSANE) and then chilled in the hotel for the night.
So that was day 1. I think i’ve spent long enough on this post, so I’ll get back to some schoolwork and post more in a bit!
Fresh off the bus from Norway and Sweden. Updates throughout the day tomorrow! About to head out to celebrate our homecoming to CPH, of course.
