First Week
Alluded towards leading up to the first week and then confirmed on the first day, the Kosovo project was called off. The embassy in Kosovo still hadn’t processed the application only a few weeks out from supposed commencement, as such funding had not come through and the plug had to be pulled. This was disappointing as it was one of the major draw cards for coming to Norway however an alternative came about fairly quickly. I’ll get into that in a second.
So on Monday the 31st of August the class, consisting of 13 students, met for the first time with two of our teachers, Pasi Aalto and Sami Rintala. The students included one Australian (myself), one Austrian, one Swiss, one French, one Icelander, two Swedes, the remainder Norwegians and both Pasi and Sami from Finland. Here we just had some introductions, outlining our favourite foods, mine being anything with vegemite, and a couple of quick presentations from Sami and Pasi. Sami describing his approach to Architecture, past studios and his work within ‘Rintala Eggertsson Architects’, and Pasi followed outlining properties of, and his obsession with, Norwegian timbers.
As I touched on earlier an alternative to Kosovo came in the form of another site within Trondheim, which is where we headed the second day. After a walk through the city we headed along the coast to a point jutting out into the water, or ‘the Fjord’, as shown below.
We arrived here to a group of old storage bunkers, somewhat imbedded in the base of this headland, built by the Germans in the Second World War. It is within one of these bunkers that we will be constructing, true to Scandinavian tradition, a sauna and potentially some other external structures. The site came about as it has been as contentious issue in recent years as difficulties with vandalism to surrounding buildings and ‘underground’ parties within the bunkers have lead to all the structures very nearly being demolished by the municipality. Following intervention by the public this was stopped and revitalisation has since begun in the area including these two timber buildings being converted into a restaurant and a recreational building of sorts. These are shown below with remnants of a little more vandalism made along the way.
To find a reference point, the little docking area on the left of the photo above can be seen in the earlier satellite photos. Now turning 180 degrees from this photo we see the bunkers shown below. Some big, some small, all covered in spray paint in quite an interesting spot. At this stage the sauna is proposed to be used by Kayakers who will be running the aforementioned recreational building, local fisherman, joggers and the like. This sauna will be in the very first bunker on the left, which is also the smallest and most probably easiest to be monitored by the adjacent buildings.
The following day a previous student at NTNU presented her masters thesis, which had investigated a revitalisation of the area. Following hearing about council’s desire to remove or fill in the bunkers, herself and Carla Carvalho - the third tutor for our course - approached the municipality and put forward the idea for the sauna. Following the presentation the rest of the day was spent sketching and exploring some ideas for the project. We had ideas of external structures mediating privacy measures between the sauna and the outside. Saunas are commonly used by people wearing no clothing who spend time moving between the hot and cold, inside and outside of the sauna.
The last day of the week we headed along to ALLSKOG a sustainable forest management company, which runs forests throughout the northern half of Norway. Following a presentation about the industry and all the benefits of using timber in Norway we headed to a forest to watch some tress getting taken down. We walked up into the forest and watched the contractor below operating his own equipment, pulling spruce trees out of the ground, turning them on end, pulling them along while ripping off all the branches and chopping them into pre determined lengths. About 10 seconds or so per tree.
This first hand reference to timber production was intended to inform us on the necessity to be aware of the origins of timber and realistic when specifying potentially unrealistic lengths and quantities.
So generally a introductory week.