lørdag 29. oktober 2011

Design project critique - thrusday 27th of october

Thursday the 27th of October the different groups presented the current statuses of their design projects.

The class is now split between two different sites which both are related to metro stations on the newly opened metro line: South Weiqu and Daminggong West.

The students working near the Daminggong West station have split up in two groups and are developing two different concepts for a complex building that connects to the metro station:

  • Dragon, by Veslemøy Grindvik, Alexandra Klein and Aprigio Chavez
  • Unnamed project investigating complexity and density, by Mortiz Kerschbaum, Fatima Farran and Anette Rudshaug

The students working on the South Weiqu station are working separately, but with a main concept (temporarily named "The Pancake") for the site connecting them loosely - similar to a think tank:

Anthropology- and travel presentations in Xi'an

During our stay in Xi'an we presented three short anthropological studies conducted in Trondheim. The theme was "Gates and Thresholds":


We also made presentations of our first week in China. We split up in four groups and travelled from three different cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong) towards Xi'an:

onsdag 28. september 2011

Presentations: The two sites

These presentations were made to share the information between the north station and the south station (the two projects sites) teams as we are moving into the design project.


SUMMARY: Introduction to the design project (a transportation hub) by Ole Møystad

28.09.2011: Ole summarized his visit to Beijing. There are possibilities of future collaborations with several Beijing universities and research institutions. Two topics have been highlighted as particularly interesting: Heritage and transportation hubs. This makes the Metamorfose course in Xi’an extremely relevant.

On hubs: There are different ways of attacking the problem (of designing the hub) - different scales/levels. Which level is relevant for us? Based on today’s situation a smaller scale than planned will perhaps be interesting. The project moves from planning/urban design towards complex hybrid buildings…

Transportation hub: Taxis, trains, metros, buses etc. in China don’t match – different people are working on the logistics, and they don’t work together. As an effect, few transportation nodes are being made. Could our project be a way of showing off how the different methods of transportation can be linked together, and use this as the starting point for a monster building/complex building/hybrid building? Said differently: One OBJECT that takes care of transportation, shopping, administration etc. as a start of a new.. village? Maybe?

Remark on maps: Chinese people don’t relate to map the same way as in Europe. Maybe they relate to events? “Go to the café and turn left”. This is interesting seeing as transportation hubs are a lot about orientation. How can I lead people easily from for instance bus to metro?

(Moritz will fill in with a PDF on hybrid buildings ASAP)

Down-up planning: From the big picture to the details (top-down) is a very efficient way of working, but what if the project was down-up? A local initiative? User based? For instance Svartlamoen. In China down-up processes are different in in Norway. In China huge development projects by real estate firms are down-up.

In Norway: Who would be the client for such a project? Speculation: Maybe it’s easier to find a client in China?

Wise words by Alex: “Take use of anthropology in the design! A grocery store and a noodle shop won’t talk to eachother…”

The practical information given is summarized in this PDF. This includes Chinese phone numbers!

fredag 9. september 2011

Charrette: Havnegata, Brattøra

Here are the five groups' presentations from a three week long charrette focusing on Havnegata (Brattøra) and its context:

tirsdag 6. september 2011

PDFs: "Architecture is a verb" & "Collage and communcation"

Here you can download the PDFs for Ole's two lectures: "Architecture is a verb" and  "Collage and communcation". You can also find them in the AAR4540-folder on Torget.

Their sizes are 28 and 13 MB respectively, so you might have to be a little patient.

Tarjei