Photo-mapPhoto-map

I’ve added some photos to Flickr, mostly ones that appeared here in the past. They are here and if you click on the “map” tab you can see where all these places are in the world. The map isn’t that good and, for instance; those places in Oslo are best guesses because the map only goes so far in. [As and aside, I find this a little bit annoying. I believe information should be more readily available then it is and I sometimes forget how new all these tools are. That said, I would like to see more mapped data for less traveled areas of the world, not just Norway. A finer grain of detail is doable, and in the future it will be there, it just isn’t there now and now is when I’d like to see it. Even so, the information on these maps for Norway, both the satellite and the line maps is lame for Norway.] That said, you can get a sense of how things are situated. What’s up there now is essentially a glimpse at all the places I’ve been since I’ve been here. I will add more photos as the days go by and as I take them. I can only upload like 100 photos to Flickr a month, so I’ll choose them carefully and maybe wont duplicate so many on the Flickr site and the blog.

Alarms!!!!!!!

Two nights ago I quietly went to bed around 10pm. Read a book for a little while, The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. (It’s all right. Science Fiction. Some parts are very poetic, but other parts are dull and lifeless and the action is drawn out and it makes me say, “get on with it.” a lot. And I think maybe Banks is trying to do something with the way it’s organized but he’s failing on the whole.) I fell asleep eventually and there I lay, minding my own business, catching z’s like there was no tomorrow when I was suddenly awakened by a screeching panicking alarm. I leapt out of bed. And when I say that, I mean literally leapt, my sleeping bag flying across the room the panicking screech alarm pulsing it’s frantic alert. It took me a moment to realize the sound was coming from one of two alarms in the ceiling. I spent a few seconds or so sleepily-wired trying to find some way to shut the thing off before the neighbors were awoken and, pissed, out circulating flyers to pull together some sort of mob to come to my door and tell me to quiet the fuck down. The alarm wouldn’t stop and I thought for a moment – how in the hell am I going to sleep with this thing going off. And all this in the span of seconds before I realized it must be some sort of building wide system and the alarm was larger then just in my room. This was confirmed as I held the screeching device in my hand having ripped it out of it’s casing) and saw the wires disappearing into the ceiling. I replaced the thing, dressed and found my way outside where were gathered everyone from my building. I was the last one out and we all stood there in the cold small hours a slight rain pelting us looking up at the tall building to see if we could spot any flames. We couldn’t. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later the Oslo Fire department showed up and silenced the alarm and let us all back to our beds. I hope that this isn’t some sort of Norwegian pastime. Fire alarms in the middle of the night as a way of building commentary or showing the comedic side of sleepy humans in the rain.
Today I went to AHO again to find out about the computer lab business but it is proving very difficult. In my worldview the computer lab should be a place where you can enter and find some one readily in charge and speak with them about any number of problems. In my current reality the computers are behind a glass wall. And you can see the people working away, but no one is obviously in charge. So there is no one I can speak to that will be able to help me. And the door I opened brought a panicked screeching alarm as if my dna was being read and rejected. Or possibly I had opened the wrong portal and the sign, in Norwegian, was actually trying to tell me that an alarm would sound if I opened the door. For when I closed the door the alarm vanished and so did I. Embarrassed. Plan B was to ask at the reception to see if they could tell me who to speak to. The receptionist turned out to be no help at all. In fact she made things incredibly complicated and so I fled in frustration, mostly because there was a line building behind me and all I wanted was the name of the person who ran the computer lab but she kept telling me to just go into the library. I couldn’t figure out why she would tell me that, the library is in a different wing of the building from the computer lab. And I assumed she misunderstood me (now I think maybe the Library might have some answers and I’ll try there tomorrow). And the line was growing and I was standing there. Saying computer lab. And she was saying, the library is just over there. And so I skipped to the next thing, which was to try to get a hold of the professor for a specific class about Norwegian architecture I want to sit in on. And so I asked about the name given on the web site, Nina Berre. And she asked are you sure that’s a professor. And she began flipping through a book. And I said well, she teaches this class. And the lady said I recognize the name but I don’t see her name here. And I said thank you and left.

So here now I sit, making plans for how to attack the problem tomorrow. Reading, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. (A bit long winded), It’s free from Project Gutenberg. They have a bunch of classic material that has gone out of copyright, which you can download and save the text to your computer. So I figure it’ll be cheaper then buying novels while I’m here. I just saved $300. Probably not, I’ll probably still buy novels. I can only read classics for so long before I crave some sort of contemporary endeavourer.

Later this week I’ll get to Horten. Until then it’s just reading and thinking. Exciting, no?

So here is a Google Earth image of my neightborhood. My building is the blue square, the Red square is AHO. To the right is my neighborhood. At teh bottom of the page you'll find a large map of Oslo.


Coupel random Photographs:

A Knut Knutson House

Half-timber frame with brick infill

aho/tickets/rain/some other things

I’ve been working on my thesis the last couple of days. Reading some books. Doing some diagrams. I’ve been hold up in my room mostly; with the occasional run or trip to the grocery just to say I got out. But most of the time has been spent in this round room, working out some thoughts. In a little while I’ll post some of the stuff I’ve sorted out for the introduction. Not today, it still needs work. No sense in putting up sophomoric ideas with retarded sentence structure (right, with the exception of all that has come before and a large part of what will come after this.) I’m still trying to get access to the computer lab (and by trying I mean I think about it and wish it was already done.) Once I do though, I’ll scan some sketches and stuff to show off. I can tell already how excited you all are.

That said, I went to try to figure out the computer lab business today, but the school was closed by the time I got there. So maybe tomorrow. I took these photographs:








The building is an old factory redesigned by Jarmund/Vignæs, completed in 2002. Jarmund of the pair is Einar Jarmund, who got a Masters in Architecture from University of Washington in the early 90’s and designed the Washington Pass Rest Facility in Washington State. He is a friend with Peter Cohen, my thesis chair, and we visited his office when I came to Oslo with the Scandinavia Program (run by Peter Cohen and Jen Dee) a couple of summers ago. Einar also was one of reviews for the Murrcut Studio a year ago last spring. At any rate, Jarmund/Vignæs designed the AHO or Oslo School of Architecture and you should check out some of their other projects on their website. I like their stuff a lot. I am going to go see Einar and maybe try to get some part time work. It would be pretty cool to watch their process.

After not getting into the school, I headed down town to buy a train ticket to Horten. Fehn did the Photographic Museum there. I got half a block from the school and it start with the rain, big thick drops which, literally, you could walk around. These, however, increased in frequency and although I took refuge under some sort of indescribable structure, it would not let up. Eventually I decided I’d get wet and went ahead on to the train station. When I got there, however, the idiotic ticket machine refused my debit card. Which tripped me out and forced me to come right home because I thought someone had gotten a hold of my banking information since there is no reason my card should have been denied. This would be a real big hassle. Some yahoo depleting my funds for some nefarious activities while I, all innocent and unsuspecting, get stranded in some foreign country with no way to buy hot dogs from the kiosks. So, out into the rain I went, trudging and worrying. I accidentally stepped in a puddle and splashed dirty water up the inside of my leg. I was thinking about all the things I would have to do if I had actually spent all my money and didn’t realize it (This could happen. I am trying to keep close tabs on my accounts, but I am notorious for letting zero balance appear and quickly descend into the depth of Overdrawn.) But when I got home, soaked all the way through my jacket, I found that no one had actually gotten a hold of my bank account and that it was some other problem probably to do with NSB. Thanks to the God.

But this did force me to evaluate my financial situation. It looks like I’m going to have to stick close to home for the next couple of weeks. I paid for all my airfare and some of my rooms for the trip to Germany/Italy/France. That, and the car trip sucked my funds near dry. So while I’m not totally busted, I’m pretty light at the moment. Ah well. I got things I can do around here for a few weeks.

I added some stuff to the sight. There is a search now, to the upper right. See it? You can search the whole Internet or just my sites. I also added a section for books. If you want to buy a book you should do it from Powel’s. They are an awesome bookstore in Portland. And if you are going to buy a book from Powel’s, you should do it through this website cause I’ll get a kick back and that would be sweet. And you would be sweet for doing it. Anyway, I’ll put up a bunch of different titles, books I’m reading, things I like, categories that interest me, excreta. I’m thinking about a sister site with reviews and annotations and what not. If you have any suggestions feel free to comment.

And finally, a couple photos:



the nimbus


door


sticker


leaves

Driving, yeah!

Four days on the road last week, a couple nights sleeping in the car, salami sandwiches and apples, 700 photographs, 3 churches, 1 Viking village, 2 Fehn museums, 5 ferryboats, and 1 Medieval farm. It was a good trip. I began by driving across the south to visit the Viking village at Avaldsnes. The village is a couple fjords north of Stavanger on an island, and I had wanted to visit it when I was there before, but I had no way to get there. So I skipped it. But, seeing as I had a car and decided I should see it. I was 8 hours to getting there. I stopped at 2 stave churches.
Roldal


Heddal

I arrived at 9pm. The sun was setting. The light was lush. This is the cathedral at the site.


I walked around a little, but couldn’t get to the actual village. I ate and then found a place to sleep. It’s tricky sleeping in the car. You want some place semi public, someplace where you wont be noticed but you also wont be broken into. It would be a hassle to wake up to someone’s arm coming through the window. You want someplace that is lit, but not some the light comes into the car. You want to avoid parking lots of retail outlets before they are closed to avoid suspicion of nefarious intent. Business parks are nice. The people arriving in the morning serve as a decent alarm clock. That’s just what I found. I had an Opel hatchback this time around. The back seat folded down and there was enough room to stretch out diagonally. With the exception of the seam between the folded down seat and the back digging into my back all night, it wasn’t half bad. I woke at 8, had some breakfast and made my way back to the Viking village.

Long House: the main dwelling of the farm
Viking Temple: This temple was part of the farmstead. Worship was conducted not as a comunity, but as a family.
Boathouse: A collection of farms was responible for building the boathouse and manning the ship in times of trouble. There would have been many of these boathouses along the Viking Kings coastal region.

I spent a couple hours taking photographs, drawings, talking to the people there. In the afternoon I headed north up the coast on my way to Ørsta, which was the true reason for the trip.

In this small, far-flung berg is the most remote of all Sverre Fehn’s buildings, the Ivar Aasen Center. I am only going to get one trip there and this was it. There are few buses there and as the weather turns into cold the roads over the mountains will shut down. So I had to get there this summer to document it. I made it to the small town of Sandane where I slept another night in the car. At four in the morning I woke up and had to pee. I climber out of the car and found a bush and took a leak and then took these photos. The fjord was so calm and the light was this gray.



I climbed back in the car, but couldn’t fall back to sleep. So I read for a couple hours and finally nodded off. I woke after 8. Before I left town I booked a room at the only hotel for that evening. And then I was off.

The Ivar Aasen center was awesome.






Very similar in organization to the Glacier and Aukrust museums. A long circulation spine with exhibitions to either side. This people here were very generous. I told them i was a student to get the discount (Usually fifty percent the adult price) and they offered to take me down stairs and show me the offices. They let me watch a movie in the theater about Ivar Aasen, who traveled around Norway in the 19th century recording dialects, folklore and eventually created Norway’s written language. He was an awesome figure, he declined to go to university because he felt it would separate him from the common folk, but he spoke like 12 languages and wrote poetry and create dictionaries and grammars. He was also a botanist. Brilliant man. He essentially had to walk all over Norway, and he covered a great deal of the place in his life. He was born in Ørsta, thus the museum. Which collects his writings and botanist notebooks and his accoutrements as well as other Norwegian language related items. The have a library, which the librarian was kind enough to walk me through and talk to me about its function and such. I got a lot of photographs of the place. Not many drawings though, time was tight and I had to get back to the hotel.

That night I slept in a really expensive bed, far over priced. I paid more then a hundred dollars and the television was so ancient the remote was as big as Buick. But the shower was nice and the bed was comfortable and it’s a prospect of relativity.

The next day I drove to the Glacier museum, took some more photos, drew some more sketches, talked my way into the offices here, so it was worth it.

Again, the Glacier Museum.

Two of the actual glaciers. If you ever get here, there is a film about the glaciers in the museum that runs on the half hour that is spectacular. There are also hiking tours of the glaciers and helicopter tours.

Then I drove home. I made a stop at a this farm:

Farm house
Pump house
Interior of a stable.

The whole trip was more then 2000km of road. All told, it was a fruitful trip. I’ve been back a couple days. I wrote another entry for Tun, and decompressed. Now I’m planning a couple more adventures before leaving for the continent in September. I’m going to try to get to Bergen for a couple of days and then try to see another Fehn building south of here. Which should, in my mind, be easy to get to, but there are no busses or ferries or trains that go there from here. It’s like 20km away. So it’s this whole complicated changing conveyances to get there.

Here are some various photos from the road. I tried to stop and take shots of various places.
This was in the high country.



The Fjords in this region are the most beautiful color green.

This is a slug I found.

I find myself drawn to the way sheep position themselves in fields.

Also, the school started up today. i most likely wont be taking a class this fall. But I’ll contact some people and try to see if I can get into any of Fehn’s houses. Maybe try to meet the man himself. Check in with some of the professors and run my ideas by them, see if they have any insights. The travel may be winding down, but the work is just beginning.

Hausmania

I was out taking some photographs today:




I thought I could enter a photograph of this thing in a photography contest, and I was taking these pictures and lamenting the light, which way flat and uninteresting. I was wandering around the lot, trying to find an angle and an interesting background on this thing, when this yard caught my eye.



I’ve actually been circling this place for a while. Intrigued by the graffiti and the obvious art community that was here. So I was minding my own business, standing outside this gate when a found a destroyed piano in the bushes. I was investigating, thinking that it would make an interesting picture when this guy wandered out of the gated yard and approached me. He said something in Norwegian. I apologized for being ignorant of his language and then he said, “Oh, yes. It was a piano. Then in was vandalized.” I agreed. He asked me where I was from. I said Seattle. He introduced himself, William. I returned, Jeff. He asked me if I’d ever been inside. I said no. And he invited me in. William was meeting some other people who he was to show around the place. We sat and talked. The couple he was meeting showed up. He invited them to sit. We were lounging on broke down couches under a tarp strung up between buildings. It was raining. William was explaining about Hausmania, the community we were sitting in. It’s an arts community, based on squatters who occupied this old fish production plant on the Akerselva River. They have a theater, studios to rent to various types of artists, venues for bands, a vegan restaurant; they squat four buildings additional buildings and are trying to set up a community within Oslo that is self-sustaining. As we sat there talking about the community, politics, squatting, anarchy, responsibility, people drifted in and out of the space. They would sit. Smoke cigarettes. Exchange pleasantries. Participate in the conversation. Leave. After a while, William began to walk us around the community. He showed us all the rooms, told various stories. At one point we were standing in a hallway when a gentleman approached. William introduced him as Günter. He then introduces the small group of his new friends. Kristin, Norwegian woman who was squatting in an abandoned five star hotel in Brussels. Her boyfriend, Guy, A Belgium and also a squatter. Both of these people had come to Norway to visit various communal situations. And myself, an architect from America. Günter looked at me and said, “Would you like to see our the model of our plans.” He lead us up to an office where they had an architectural model from a charette they had with the city to develop the community. We spent another hour and a half with Günter talking about the plans and the community. I was inspired. The effort and passion these people exhibited for their community, the obstacles they faced, from bureaucratic frustration to individual indifference to selfish acts, was amazing. I offered what help I could afford. I will visit them again.

some days of not too much

I have been planning a few trips the last couple of days. Figuring out how to get to Paris, Munich, Venice and Rome next month. I have a new found respect for my buddy Alex who is also my travel agent. It is actually work organizing planes flights, hotels and transfers. Anyway, I am almost set with that. And Tuesday I have a car rented and will be gone all week driving around the country. Should be cool.

The other day I met Andrew, another Valle student. He's down in Ås, south of Oslo. He's an Urban Planning PhD. We had dinner. He seems like a reasonable sort of fellow.

Here are photos:

Kiosk


Gamle Aker Kirke


Bøler Library


Sticker

Copper built Røros

The last couple of days I‘ve been in Røros. This little town is 5 hours north of Oslo. It was built in the early 1600, designed around copper mines that were found in the area. The town is a World Heritage site and has preserved both the smelting works as well as original dwellings from the earliest parts of its history through the 20th century. There are a lot of lessons here with regard to the development of the architecture.

There are two main streets, Kjerkgata and Bergmannsgata. These run parallel to each other and the river, northeast-southwest. The first two shots are looking up and down Kjerkgata respectively. The third is looking up Bergmannsgata and the forth is a random street.






Here are some shots of the river, north of the city.





The smelting works. There were several copper mines all over the region. The raw ore dug out of the ground was brought here and turned into copper. The river was used for various aspects of the process. The large building on the left is now a museum.





The smelting process is basically a separation of the copper from the imperfect stone. This process uses heat and the byproduct is slag. The slag is tossed into a heap. Now you can walk around on this heap and take pictures. The chemicals have colored the ground into reds and browns and grays. Quite beautiful if not a little depressing.






The cathedral in Røros holds the most people of any in Norway. 1600 people. It’s made of both stone and wood. It was paid for by the copper mines.



A stone barn. I like this building a lot.




A small piece of anachronisms.



At night I just hung out in the Hotel. I was only there for two days. I would have been there a third day, but the ticket I thought was for 4:37pm was actually for 4:37am. It’s a problem with the twenty-four hour clock. Sometime when I’m checking boxes off in a computerized form I forget that if you want to have something happen at 4pm you should actually be typing in 16:00. So yesterday morning I had to get up at 3:30 and catch a train. This turned out to be fine, but I was really tiered all day yesterday. Here is a photo looking up Kjerkgata at 4am.




So here is a thing. The hotel room had a television. I don’t have a television; I haven’t now for a couple of year. I like not having a television. I watch movies on my computer, or read. Since I’ve been here in Norway I’ve found a couple of fair use sites which stream documentaries and old movies that are no longer under copy write protection. This suits my needs. But I love television. I enjoy going to my friend’s homes and watching the cable that they have. I don’t need to do it a lot, but every once in a while it’s nice to just watch television. If I had one of my own I would watch it all the time. That’s why I don’t have one. It wasn’t helping me in Graduate school. So anyway, the point is when there is a television around, I watch it. And there was one at the hotel. And it was on the entire time I was in the room. Even while sleeping. But there were only 2 channels, NRK1 and NRK 2. National Norwegian Stations. And they showed a bunch of Norwegian shows, in Norwegian. And a couple of English sitcom and dramas and stuff. It would be useful to have a television to help learn the language, especially since everything has subtitles. But I’m going to get one. But I’ll watch it if it’s available. So I was watching the television, bouncing back and forth between channels when a drama for deaf people came on. It was awesome. But while I was watching it I realized that I didn’t know what they were saying in two languages at the same time. I understood neither the finger language nor the Norwegian. I was astounded at my ignorance. Then I turned the channel and Friends was on and so I watched that.

Here are some movies of the train ride home. I was trying to get different parts of the landscape so you could see the way the land changes in such a short amount of time. From thick forest to river valley to rolling fields to mountains. It’s quite beautiful, the land, not the movies. The movies are all jigglly and rocky and of considerable low production value. Enjoy.