window, house, library, studio, city, stickers

I have spent the last couple of weeks pounding out the second chapter of my thesis. It’s draft, but it’s done. It clocks in at 70 pages and takes you from the dawn of man in Scandinavia to the 1800’s through the lens of making buildings. There are a couple of holes, and it still needs work, like I have to sort out the notes and do a few rewrites. But at least it’s at a place where I can start working it. I had wanted to finish by the beginning of December, but that just wasn’t happening. It turned out to be slow going. Now, however, I essentially have two chapters in draft and half the introduction written. And I can start work on the next part, the analysis and comparison between Fehn and the Norwegian vernacular, which is really the thesis part. Hopefully I can knock this out by the time I leave and then have the remaining time before I present in June to work up a presentation and figure out what is interesting about what I’ve done. Sometimes when I think about this I get a little nervous. I’m trying to figure out what exactly I have been doing. What is the purpose for this expedition, and why is it important to the larger context of architecture. As I don’t fully know the answer to these (and many other) questions, I start thinking about the silence that will accompany the end of the presentation. The blank stares of the jurors and the confused muttering of the thesis committee. In my mind it’s a big mess. Hopefully it’ll work itself out before June.

On the weather front (see how I did that? pretty clever huh?) It’s still miserably bright and cheerful here. Sunny days. Temperature soaring into the 40’s. No snow anywhere and it’s almost Christmas. I check the forecasts and Yahoo has snow coming on Tuesday. But the Weather Underground has just overcast on Tuesdays, not even rain and temperatures close to 50. I gotta tell you, I wish the folks at Yahoo are correct, but the Weather Underground strikes me as a group of people who are actually in the know, and not a service of, well, yahoos, trying to pass information on without any real accountability. The sad part is I came to one of the few countries in the world I was sure would have snow on Christmas and it’s looking like there’s gonna be sunny skies and tropical temperatures. Stupid weather.

I took a couple trips into the city the last few weeks looking for various buildings. I took the subway for the first time in a while, out to Holmenkollen to find one of Fehn’s houses. I got lost for a while. It was cold up there, Holmenkollen is on a ridge to the north west of the city. It’s where the Ski jump is from when the Olympics were here. There was ice on the sidewalks up there, even though the sun was bright. Anyway, the street signs were all mixed up and hard to follow. Eventually I found the house.




Unfortunately I couldn’t see much of it. I figured the thing to do is to write letter to the people who own the houses that Fehn designed and ask them for permission to photograph. Otherwise the parts my thesis dealing with the houses will just have to be scanned images of these places, which will be fine. But it would be better if I could get to them, walk around, maybe have a peek inside. Is that asking to much? Can I invade you home for my thesis?

I decided to try to write letters to these people on the way back down into the city on the train. So instead of going out to the other house Fehn designed here in Oslo, which I had planned for the same day, I went instead to the Oslo University to see this building.






It’s a library and there are some other things going on in there. The cladding it’s a black granite and when I was there the sun was shining on the southeast (go figure) and the low angle light was glinting off the flecks in the rock cladding. It was nice. And I liked these window shades on the outside of the building that could be moved as needed. But over all the building was only mediocre.

I also found this building which I have no idea who designed. I think it's some sort of studio. In was on the nrk (Norwegian Television) campus. I liked the great curving copper roof. I spotted it from a good distance away and had to go investigate.


I also went to find another building I saw from the train (not the subway, but the actual city to city type train). A little steel and wood number some where along the line (I’m not sure exactly where). But after wandering around all afternoon and getting lost in the new construction of the freeway I was forced to make my way back into the city with out finding the building. Once in the city I bought a $30 roll of tracing paper, white because all I had was yellow, and a new pencil.

I also went half way to the Folk Museum but had to turn back because I thought I left my stove on. I do that sometimes. Just leave the stove on after cooking some food or boiling water for tea. I’ll discover it minutes or hours later, the burner quietly heating nothing but air. Luckily nothing has ever burned down, but at my old apartment I remember coming home from school late at night having been in studio for hours and finding the stove or oven still on. It troubles me sometimes and so if I suddenly think about it and try to remember if I did or did not leave a stove on and if I can not positively remember turning the knob I am forced to conclude that there is a distinct possibility that I left the damn thing on. This happened. And even though I told myself I was fine, that I shut it off and even if I didn’t it would be fine until I got home, I eventually turned around. Once back home I found that I had, indeed, turned off the burner.

But that adventure was not totally lost because I invented this way of taking pictures of the city that are a little more dynamic then point and shoot at interesting things. I find a f-stop and exposure and then hold the camera in my hand as I walk along and snap pictures from the waist without seeing what I am photographing. Then everything becomes interesting. This works particularly well in crowds. Here are some



















I also found another pieces by this sticker artists. This is my favorite so far. I’m pretty sure it’s the same artists as the bunny collages I posted earlier.





Other then that not a lot is going on. Christmas is coming. I’ve got less then 3 months left in country. Things are winding up. I’m starting to turn my attention to the future. Job. Place to live when I get back to city. What it’ll be like to start doing architecture for real. Seeing my new nephew. Seeing my friends. I didn’t really meet a lot of people here. Mostly because I was busy with my work, traveling and what not. It’ll be nice to sit around and have some beers and conversation.

Anyway, that’s where everything stands now.