leaves and stuff

The days are getting short. Really short. And cold. And it’s these beautiful wet days where the sky is like a blanket of slate pulled over the earth. The leaves are all turned. This city is veined with green spaces, parks and yards, small oasis in the urban landscape. Streets lined with trees, boulevards. Leaves are everywhere. The smell is hypnotic. That fruitmusk of rotting vegetation. People are lighting fires so the smoke mixes in the wind and you walk outside and hug yourself close and say, “Yeah, this is autumn.”



The best is when the sun does show its face. Pushing its way out from behind the heavy sky to lay rays along the trees and prove that It all does mean something somewhere. The days are still cold, but the sun makes you smile.
The last month has been trying. I got back from that trip exhausted. For about two weeks I didn’t do much. I worked on those last posts. I thought about things. About my thesis. About what’s going to happen next. How to start pulling things together. I worried a little bit because I couldn’t find the energy to pick the thing back up. It was soggy with potential, but weighted down with my own expectations of what should happen. So I was rutting it for a while. I’d look at the books piled on my desk and think “How in the hell am I suppose to synthesize all these ideas.” It was a little bit frightening and unwieldy. So I would go on these walks. Look at how the city was changing. Try and feel what the Vikings felt. What the Danes felt when then occupied. I have been trying to understand Oslo as it slips into the dark. And I gotta tell you it is pretty pleasant. This city is of the dark half of the year. It’s made for winter. Made for autumn.
The people on the street have changed. There are still a good number of people that walk the city. Shopping along Karl Johanes gate. But they are no longer tourists, snapping photos of the statue-ized mimes. Now they are mothers buying cloths. And couples strolling in the evening. And families going to supper. This is when the city becomes the city again, and not a tourist outfit.


I walked up along the Akerselva to its source. A lake that sits above Oslo in the forested region. The trail leads literally from my front door all the way. I was hoping that I’d touch the water, but for some reason it’s all fenced off. It looks like private land all the way around. Which I’m sure is not the truth, I’m sure there is access somewhere, just not logically at the end of the pedestrian trail that leads all the way from the lake to fjord. It was a great walk, but I couldn’t get any closer then these for pictures.


I’ve found some good buildings. A couple of functionalist projects that I really like. They are both quite buildings, off the beaten track, but superb examples of functionalist architecture.


I also visited this great church by Knut Knutson. Good stuff.



I have also been noticing this artists work around town. These are stickers. Some of them are big, 2 or 3 feet tall. Some, like the bunny heads are fist size. There is a simplicity to the work that I admire. And a geometric view of color.




I also saw this tag. Usually I’m not a fan of this type of graffiti, but I like this guy.


I met with Christian Hermansen at AHO. He’s my contact here. I wanted to ask about some papers regarding Sverre Fehn that might be available and also find out if I could get into some classes and what not. When I got there he was going to introduce me to Per Olaf Fjeld. An instructor at AHO who has written one of the few books on Fehn and who use to work with him. But Fjeld wasn’t around and so I missed him. It also seems that I missed classes altogether. Or at least the one I wanted to take this semester. Which is entirely my fault. I was out of town at the beginning of the semester and then gone those weeks on the trip and it seems that they are now in the exam and presentation mode. No big, although the class was perfect, all about Norwegian architecture and Sverre Fehn. There is another class, however, next semester and I’ll try to sit in on it for a couple weeks before I leave in March. They actually build different architectural details from Norway’s vernacular. If I can swing it, it’ll be pretty cool.
I did find out that they have a free lecture every Thursday. I attended the last on. It was interesting. By a guy named Shaun Murry, from London. It was called “The Illustrated Primer for Digital Architecture.” It was about the relationship of research and investigation, using digital tools, to the practice of architecture. In other words, using various research techniques, like collecting data for how a tide affects an outcropping of rocks for instance. Plotting that using various algorithms and whatnot. And then creating representations of these phenomena, whatever they may be, that begin to help the architect see architecture in a way that is more connected to the natural processes in any ecology in which he might want to build. It was fascinating. There are questions about how you then start to make space, usable and comfortable, out of these representations, but the path seems worthwhile. At any rate, there is a lecture every week and it’ll get me thinking about other things. Unfortunately, the week prior, Zaha Hadid was here. Which would have worth listening to her. But I missed.

Things are going good for the most part. Except it’s the Daylight Savings weekend where we “fall back.” This happens to be my favorite weekend of the year. That extra hour seems so luxurious. The extra hour of party on Saturday night where at 1am you’re like, no way, it’s really midnight! The extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning to recuperate. They don’t carry on with any of that nonsense here, so I get to miss it this year. Which means I have to experience two “spring forwards” before I get my next “fall back”. Which sucks. I’ll be down a “fall back” the rest of my life. I’ll never be able to get that back. So I’m a little bummed about that. But otherwise, golden. I’ve downloaded a few things off iTunes. Which I didn’t want to do, but I can only read and write for so long before my head starts to hurt. So while I eat I watch a movie or Lost or The Office or Battlestar Galactica. It’s relaxing. It’s what television should be. A good show when I want to watch it. My pleasure on my time. Anyway, that’s the most exciting thing going these day. I’m getting ready to take a trip up to Trondheim. Maybe at the end of the week. And then one more out to Bergen if I can swing it before the weather turns and then mostly day trip close to Oslo after that. I had one planned for last Tuesday, a day trip that is, but I over slept and missed my train. I felt like an ass, like I cheated myself for an extra hour of sleep. But sometimes it’s hard to get up in the dark. And when it’s dark until 8:30, it’s hard to get up at 8. I’m trying to make this a regular thing, getting up at 8. So far I have done it exactly zero times in the last month. Once I slept until 11:45, something not seen since I use to stay up until 4am writing bad novels and dumb poetry. It’s frustrating; because when I finally am awake I really want to get up in the morning. To be adult. To enjoy the day before noon. But when I’m asleep I want to get up at 10am. So my awake self is fighting with my asleep self right now and that’s a little unnerving. Like having two roommates mad at each other and not talking and your still friends with both. So when you hang out with one they’re always badmouthing the other and vise versa the other way around. All morning long I gotta listen to awake Jeff piss and moan about asleep Jeff and how he’s a lazy bum ruining our future cause he doesn’t have the will to stay awake at 8am when the alarm goes off. And the every morning at 8am I get to hear asleep Jeff cuss sleepily as he stumbles across the room to shut off the alarm that awake Jeff set the night before, calling awake Jeff an asshole for even setting the alarm at all and going right back to that blissful sleep you get when you are awakened hour before you actually have to get up. And I’m caught in the middle, cause I like sleeping. And I like getting up. It’s a no win situation really. And the battle continues.