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Traces of Nature
No full textGreenland, observed from the north pole, holds the potential of becoming a transit point for aerial and maritime routes between North America, Asia, and Europe. The situation locates the island at the center of the world. And with the ice retreating and gradually creating openings, human access to the virgin landscape is now a reality. Areas that once were covered in ice, will now be even more available for tourists wanting to escape crowds and experience nature in solitude.
However, there is an opportunity to anticipate the transformation of the Greenlandic landscapes and design strategies that help minimize the environmental footprint caused by nature-based tourism. By implementing the concepts of ‘Slow-tourism’ and ‘Nanotourism’ the strategy will be to promote a form of tourism that involves immersion at the destination, longer stays, and offers experiences rooted in the landscape and local culture.
In Disko Bay, the largest of these settlements is the town of Ilulissat, which stands at the entrance to the Jakob-shavn Icefjord. The Icefjord was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 and since then it has be-come one of the most visited sites in Greenland.
Ilulissat is located in a richly geological area with citizenry who care about the environment and cherish their open space. Therefore, the preservation of this pristine character is important to the community identity and is one of the primary aims of the project.
The proposal is a trail primarily for walking within and through the site. In addition to active immersive opportunities, it is programmed to provide educational opportunities for local users and visitors. This structure evokes the form of an “esker” and it seeks to preserve the natural habitat and beauty of the site, encouraging visitors to stay in safe areas, while also allowing them to relate to their surroundings.
Landforms resulting from the glacier moving forward and retreating are called out and incorporated in the trail’s design development with the purpose of revealing the story of the glacier as well as involving visitors with the landscape in a pedagogic way. These new experiences of destination infrastructure, will provide continuous engagement with the landscape and work as a node along a larger pathway with the purpose of maintaining visitors’ safety, directing and congregating them in specific destinations thus, reducing the stress on the landscape.submittedVersio
Inside Healthcare Design Labs : Exploring the practice of healthcare service design in the context of embedded service design labs
Get PDFOver the past two decades there has been a rise in using service design within healthcare and service design has been identified as particularly appropriate to support adaptations and innovations in the healthcare context through using a participatory, action-oriented, step-by step processes of learning and decision making. However, the complex characteristics of healthcare systems and wicked nature of problems that arise in such settings can challenge service design practice to develop new methods and ways of working. Recently, design labs have emerged in the area of healthcare as a way to support service design practices carried out in such settings. Despite a growing body of knowledge, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of how service design is practiced inside such lab spaces in general and specifically in the context of healthcare. It is important to create a better understanding about healthcare service design practices and how design labs may support them to strengthen healthcare organisations’ ability to innovate and change.
The overarching aim of the research presented here was to explore how service design labs may act as supportive spaces for practicing service design inside large healthcare service systems. Framed by pragmatism as its philosophical stance, the research applied a blend of narrative inquiry and action research by design as the overall methodologies. Four 10–12-weeklong action research interventions supported inquiry into real-life service design processes that were carried out inside three large Norwegian hospitals. The empirical findings from these interventions were then systematically reflected upon and analysed using the coresearchers’ own experiences as design managers and service designers before being blended with theoretical perspectives from design and service design, service marketing theory and systems theory. The insights from these interventions, alongside the narrations of healthcare service designers, were merged with viewpoints from theory into four publications and the current exegesis.
This study explicates the compound approaches used by service design practitioners amid the complexities inevitably found in healthcare. It identifies and explicates the central healthcare service design conversation and facilitation practices. Further, it builds a theoretical frame for service design labs to act as supportive physical, social and imaginary spaces. Additionally, the research conceptualises service design labs as temporal and situated metadesigns inside complex service systems. These ontributions are important because temporally embedded service design labs allow for more flexible and situated applications of such supportive infrastructures. Furthermore, this research offers practical guidelines for setting up and using temporally embedded service design labs as supportive spaces for integrating service design capabilities into healthcare organisations to help them adapt to changes and harvest innovations.publishedVersio
Timber Tales : A Qualitative Study of Timber Materiality in Housing Projects
Get PDFThis qualitative study addresses how architects and residents employ, experience and value wooden building materials in housing projects, arguing that buildings that are loved last longer and thus contribute to both ecological and social sustainability. Qualitative aspects are underrepresented in the common argumentation for an increased use of wooden construction materials as well as in current timber research; they are also generally absent from building codes and technical guidelines, as the main focus is on quantifiable benefits. In addition, professional views are dominant while the users’ expectations and experiences receive little attention. This thesis aims to foster a more holistic take on sustainability and to re-incorporate architectural themes into the consideration of wooden building materials. To do so, it gathers professional perspectives from academia and from practice, as well as including the views of inhabitants, who are most often laypeople. It seeks to answer the following research questions: How have materiality and particularly concepts related to wooden materials been discussed in architectural history and theory? How do contemporary architects view wooden materiality’s contribution to their architectural ambitions? How do inhabitants perceive and value the materiality of wooden constructions in the buildings they inhabit? How do these perspectives converge or diverge? In three ‘timber tales’, an overview of architectural theory related to materiality provides generalized approaches to designing with timber, which are then investigated in the contextualized built reality of recent precedents in Norway and Central Europe. Contemporary timber architects’ conception of the materiality in their housing projects is complemented by how inhabitants of these buildings experience the wooden materiality. The results of literature studies, document analyses, qualitative interviews, site visits and insights gained teaching two master’s studio courses substantiate new approaches to everyday timber architecture. They also furnish a vocabulary with which to discuss the often tacit qualities of architectural design. Furthermore, the findings reveal the untapped potential and mutual benefits of improved communication between architects and inhabitants. Although location, size or price tend to dominate the choice of a home, qualitative aspects are able to ‘up-value’ a place of residence for inhabitants; even more so if architecture is not left to speaking for itself, but when the realisation of qualities results from intersubjective processes between expert and user, such as communication by way of words or images, or participatory design processes. Regarding design, the tectonic disclosure of timber’s affordances (e.g. ways to use or modify it) should be balanced with its atmospheric and sensory qualities. This may contribute to reducing the longing for constant renewal and augmented possession and help redefine desire as a source of inspiration instead. Furthermore, architects are part of actively shaping the frameworks for the production and general reception of timber architecture. This thesis prompts the reimagination of qualities and values that contribute to more loveable built environments and raises awareness of the larger contexts with which they interact. It aspires to provide a multi-faceted background that will inspire and inform design decisions in future timber projects whilst enriching and broadening architectural discourse and education.acceptedVersio
Naked Architecture
Get PDFPublic spaces of car and of man are not separate. Despite the dimensions that form them are often unique, the qualities they possess are often shared - being spatially generous, functionally versatile and highly intertwined with urban fabric.
Car parks, specifically, are curious places in a city. They serve the vast infrastructure of a larger whole while vehicles are, in the course of a daily cycle, shuffled in and out. Whether being above or below ground, the resulting spaces is that of a compressed machine, meant to utilize most out of its given footprint. Despite the required efficiency of spatial use, they still hold the car as its main subject, resulting in an architecture driven by a larger-than-human scale that equals that of plazas and avenues.
It is this special quality of public-ness that a car park possesses, that I wanted to study. Within such a structure, generous voids in an endless flux between vacancy and occupancy leaves room for more - a public, even half-private, performance. I propose an above-ground multi-story car park where space of man and machine is partnered.submittedVersio
Kristiania Teglverk: Preservation of architecture and ecology ; A new annex to NATUR Vocational School and developing a flower field at Bryn
Get PDFMore then ever we are demolishing our built environment and obliterating our nature in the sake of progress. This attitude towards the existing environment has high costs on many levels. As a coming architect I am inspired to think and see value in what we already have around us, both the built and the living. In the design process words like securing, preserving and maintaining has gained new strength. And only when needed, additions are made.
This diploma work explores aspects of preservation of architecture and ecology through a existing example; Kristiania Teglverk at Bryn in Oslo. Attempts to discover and seek correlation between these two fields are tested. Kristiania Teglverk, a former brick factory from 1898 had and have a intertwined relation to the surrounding nature and the Alna River passing by.
I have approached and learned about the building and the surrounding ecosystems taking different paths. These paths or branches are organized in five delivery documents. They can be seen as separate documents or all together feeding in to my attempt to get closer to the relationship between Architecture and Ecology, with old Kristiania Teglverk as the centre of attention.
A major focus of this delivery has been the search in finding a program and a proposal for the building that can inherit the discussion of the relationship between Architecture and Ecology. This search of program was not linear and can be seen in fragments in the different documents attached, more or less highlighted.
The conclusion of the search for program ended in two levels - The Landscape and the Building. The two levels are connected by the existing path D10 following the Alna River from the Fjord almost to the source in Marka. This path enables the visitors to explore and discover the diversity of nature, the collection of old industrial buildings along the river and their mutual relation. The path is broken at the Bryn area with Kristiania Teglverk in the centre.submittedVersio