Oslo’s Architecture Triennale sets out on a mission for neighbourhoods

There is no easy way to describe 2022’s Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) – whose theme Mission Neighbourhood builds upon a surging global interest in development of the local environments, from the Parisian 15-minute city to Barcelona’s Superblocks. What can safely be said is that its content is much more building-based than the 2019 event, The Architecture of Degrowth, curated by the UK’s Phin Harper and Smith Mordak.

The aim this year has been to engage further with the public and those outside the built environment industry to promote more ambitious practice. It is more commercially driven than ever before, with the lead curator also taking on the role of director, trialling a new model to create a ‘different kind of connectivity with Oslo’. So says curator-director Christian Pagh, who has an ambitious five-year plan for the Triennale, rather than the usual three. He also would like to curate the next one, planned for 2025. ‘Can we become more relevant than just the event held every three years?’ he asks, rhetorically.

With a background in philosophy and material culture before moving into architecture and planning, Pagh most recently founded Danish strategic design office Urgent.Agency and started planning for the topic Mission Neighbourhood by questioning the ‘generic’.

‘We can do it better,’ he says energetically pointing to images of existing housing estates whose layouts have been dictated by repetition.

Showcasing a pack of research from across the Nordic countries and key cities, as well as a few exhibits from the UK and Austria, the eighth edition of OAT also hones in heavily on what is happening within its home city in terms of urban planning and its drive towards making a better city for all, socially and environmentally.

Norway’s capital is nearly car-free. It established its Car Free Liveability Programme initiative to create a greener and more inclusive city in 2019, giving the streets back to its people. This has set the scene for future developments: schemes with an emphasis on outdoor space and more sophisticated interrelationship with the urban fabric.

Indeed, the Triennale’s ‘working title’ Mission Neighbourhood – (Re)forming Communities, comes at an apt time for Oslo, where attention has shifted from the city’s infrastructure issues towards making its neighbourhoods more equitable, more community-focused, and greener both literally and environmentally to help Norway reach its climate goal – which is more advanced than the UK’s.

Despite the ‘Nordic way’ of development differing to that of our own – in terms of legislation, design, governmental money allocation, planning and stakeholder networks – the goal of creating more sustainable living environments is shared. So, what can we learn?

OAT 2022 is split into six ‘perspectives’ relating to the city. Not obviously methodical these give some structure to the themes discussed which overlap massively – and reflect areas Pagh has identified as most urgent to explore when it comes to neighbourhood: Understanding Places, Social Infrastructure, Our Streets, Naturehood, Reforming Systems and Alternative Practices.

 A ‘pop-up laboratory’ exploring these themes and constituting the majority of the Triennale’s research content is contained in Oslo’s Old Munch Museum, which sits on the edge of Tøyenparken. This museum, previously dedicated to the life and works of artist Edvard Munch, was closed after a new £235 million ‘mega’ Munch was completed in 2021 – and so has spent the last year lying empty with no plan for its future use: so its appropriation by the Triennale is perfect, helping reintegrate the building into Oslo life, although it apparently took almost six months of negotiation with the city to be able to do so.

The exhibition content immediately hits you with big commercial phrases like ‘productivity’, ‘connectivity’ and ‘cross-pollination’ but once you dig a little deeper you realise it’s a more forward-looking think-tank approach to its matter. It’s a platform that both governance, students and activists can engage with on some level – slickly accessible.

The first installation you enter is Noisy Neighbourhoods, curated by cultural think-tank CSAM, the City of Malmö, White Arkitekter and local artists. A flashing plastic archway highlights the use of noise as a planning tool while doubling as a marker for the first point of interaction with the Triennale. The focus for this piece of community engagement, although not well visually illustrated, is Sofielund, a run-down industrial area turned cultural and social manufacturing hotspot in Malmö, Sweden’s third largest city.

It brings together stories of collaborations and exchanges, maps existing and new conditions and brings five years of mixed-media material together to create a strategic document that calls for a slower pace of development.

As a lover of desolate photography, I’m drawn to The Remains of Eden, the documentation of ground-floor terraces in recently built housing in Oslo by photographer Helge Garke. This explores how residents react to the character and density of new architecture and their surroundings in a sort of visual post-occupation evaluation. The terraces are documented during winter and early spring, when there is no foliage and they are too cold for people, forcing one’s eye to focus on the details of how the built fabric has been individually inhabited in a sort of game of spot-the-difference between public and private.

One of the most striking installations is a circular fabric wall-hanging superimposed with imagery of a new ‘wilderness’ for the historic centre of Vienna. Freie Mitte questions the validity of producing ‘well organised’ public squares and StudioVlayStreeruwitz presents how they have transformed an 11ha post-industrial site by allowing it to be overtaken by nature – the exact opposite to re-establishing order through urban planning. It’s about ecological madness and it’s chaotically great.

Gellerup: Mission Neighbourhood Plants features a film – Parklife (2022) – made by Gamma Film about residents of The Gellerup Plan, Denmark’s largest Modernist housing estate in Aarhus, developed by Brabrand Housing Cooperative in the early 70s. Nature-based design studio SLA has used planting and a new park to transform the social housing, which had faced demolition, into a more secure social and biodiverse neighbourhood – a prototype that can be applied elsewhere.

One of two contributions from the UK, Croydon Urban Room, discusses how we can make public engagement into a more empowering experience for members of the community. Croydon’s Placemaking team has re-created its 2019 ‘shopfront’ physical platform in that of Old Munch as a form of ‘demystifying planning processes’ and celebrate the diverse histories of the London borough.

These and other installations highlight the importance of recording ongoing developments, whether it is through photography, writing, filmmaking, or mapping, and how these forms of documentation are often more useful than figures. Numbers don’t show the unpredicted forms of human or wildlife inhabitation, or even what it is that individuals desire in their neighbourhoods.

One other exhibit at the centre of Old Munch, is perhaps the most confusing part of the exhibition for international visitors. Entitled Oslo in the Making, a central gallery is crammed with 16 competition entries for the new neighbourhood of Grønlikaia, a former closed quay area between green Ekebergskråningen and Oslo’s fjord. This is slated to become housing, office space and harbour promenade as part of Oslo’s waterfront urban renewal project Fjordbyen.

Described by the team as a ‘report of contemporary urban development in Oslo, with a focus on ongoing projects and practices related to notions of community and neighbourhood’, the space presents large projects currently under development to give a more realistic rather than romanticised perspective on creating neighbourhoods.

It aims to answer the question ‘what is the state of neighbourhood thinking – and doing – in the Norwegian capital in 2022?’

Having worked on their proposals for six months, the 16 architect-led teams were selected from 118 open applications by developer Hav Eiendom. They were then chosen to work on one of the five planned sub-areas identified in the future east section of Bjørvika. These are now on display with the idea that members of the public can give direct feedback on the schemes, in a sort of community engagement meets design review format.

Until the end of October, an evaluation committee will review the entries and recommend concepts for further development. A diverse selection, Pagh says the schemes were chosen more for ‘public discussion’ rather than saying ‘they’re all good’.

It’s an interesting way of making the Triennale connect more with the people of Oslo and opening the conversation on a more literal level. To outsiders though, it feels a closed discussion and, perhaps slightly out of place: more suited to be hosted closer to the site it explores.

Overall, as a collection of ongoing research, this Triennale is slick and in some places too idealised but could certainly inform policy-makers going forward. Pagh’s selection of projects shows that that is exactly what the built environment is about: numerous stakeholders coming together to collaborate and educate and learn.

Next time, if he is indeed curator again, Pagh has plans to move the topic on, to focus on smaller towns and the countryside, and concentrate more on social injustice. This is perhaps where this year’s content is most baggy: diversity in terms of wealth and the meeting of different communities.

Generally though, all the tools for making ‘better’ neighbourhoods and devices for ‘avoiding the generic’ – whether it’s rewilding, shared living, co-operatives, diverse community engagement, rethinking the street, altering infrastructure, creating car-free zones – that are explored in this Triennale can be applied to the UK.

Interestingly, none of the exhibits explicitly discuss re-use of buildings, but it is entwined subtly through many of the narratives on display. This is where the conditions of Nordic countries differ to that of our own – there’s just more open space for new build and experimentation – suggesting that retrofit becoming one of the key directions of sustainable architecture for the UK is also a symptom of our own density.
The Oslo Architecture Triennale 2022 runs until 30 October.

Elsewhere in the Triennale 2022 programme

Alongside a host of series of events and talks taking place in the duration of the six-week programme, open until 30 October 2022, there are a few other exhibits taking place within the city.

Coming into Community

At The National Museum – Architecture at Bankplassen, a Classical-style building built by Christian Heinrich Grosch (and not to be confused with its monumental sister, the Kleihues + Schuwerk-designed main National Museum further down the road), there is the strong and professionally put together exhibition Coming into Community. This is part of the museum’s Queer Culture year-long programme, a slight side-step from the content of the main bulk of the Triennale, but also providing much needed relief from idealism.

The focus – how architecture and urban planning has been influenced by ideas about community – aims to showcase alternative communities in architecture and is about both inclusion and exclusion.

It takes a two-pronged approach: a traditional exhibition in The Bucher Room showing a series of case studies based on archive material from Norway, US and the UK, and an interactive installation in the museum’s Sverre Fehn-designed pavilion.

The Bucher Room displays examples from the past 70 years to question what urban planning looks like from queer, feminist and other marginalised perspectives.

Its starting point is post-war housing policy, renowned for providing secure homes for nuclear families, highlighting that it was only during the 60s and 70s that ideas about inclusion and diversity began to influence home building in Norway.

One of the projects featured here are four blocks that were built at Enerhaugen, Oslo in 1965 for housing cooperative OBOS, renowned for being the first residential scheme where single people could buy apartments in the country.

Other ‘DIY’ housing schemes included are Svartlamon in Trondheim, Selegrend near Bergen, and Lambertseter in Oslo – some of which have been beautifully photographed by AJ columnist David Grandorge – and demonstrate alternatives to traditional ‘Nordic’ housing that either were or are built and functioning neighbourhoods.

Two other displays feature the work of feminist architecture collective Matrix, who in the 1980s offered free architecture services to marginalised groups, and the work of US architect, photographer and filmmaker Phyllis Birkby who campaigned to raise awareness of women’s needs in architecture.

The gem of the exhibit however is Swedish art and architecture collective MYCKET’s takeover of the pavilion to turn it into a queer nightclub, linking the concept of ‘finding one’s community’ to a time, a place, and a piece of architecture, says the collective.

‘Temporary spaces and rooms have a repairing impact for people’ they say and the space they have created by translating their energy – nicknamed ‘Mycketland’ – is both moveable and touchable. Utilising the concrete columns of Fehn’s 2008 minimalist pavilion with light touch spatial modifications, they have recreated a bar and dressing room with costumes for visitors to try on, additionally becoming a location for site-specific drag performances.

Just through interaction and by creating sense of joy for all, it succeeds in providing this sense of community that the whole of the Triennale is chasing in some form or another. Coming into Community runs until 29 January 2023. The exhibition will be archived in a 3D digital format.

Betraktninger = Observations, Dialogues and Actions

If you’re missing your fill of the ultra-conceptual, then this is the place for you. Held in Galleri ROM, an independent ‘experimental’ architectural gallery, 16 projects submitted through ideas and pictures rather than ‘finished items’ are on display here. ‘Process-based rather than words’ is how ROM’s director Gjertrud Steinsvag describes the exhibit.

Peter Cook: Ideas for Cities

This is probably the biggest international draw to this year’s Triennale, and randomly so. A large body of drawing work by British architect Cook on display in Old Munch, selected mainly due to Pagh’s love of their ‘vividness’, there’s a loose connection to the theme – with only a small nod to Oslo, a city Cook has obviously visited throughout his life and where a few works have been made. Drawings range from the most famous The Plug-in City with Archigram to proposals for Oslo itself. It’s a journey through hand-made imagery but nothing to be learnt here beyond the basic joys of picture-making.

Dreams need action

A Triennale-off exhibition by ACAN’s Nordic branch. Here an exhibition becomes a framework around conversations and experiences of the industry facing the climate crisis whereby the action group showcase their own campaigns and invite players to contribute.

Multispecies Neighbourhoods

A mini forest of more than 30 edible plants have been grown in a huge straw and clay sphere for an installation in the courtyard of the Old Munch by local studio Atelier Dalziel in collaboration with Ask Holmen. The conceptual prototype is a scale model of a ‘food forest’ and is intended to show how urban neighbourhoods could be more biodiverse, raising the awareness of food forestry as an ancient concept that is older than agriculture itself. Visitors can glimpse a miniature swing, alongside plants and the reveals of the straw and clay through windows that punctuate the walls.

Trehus

Initiated by art collective Skaus, this temporary structure ‘reframes’ a linden tree by the entrance of the Old Munch Museum, aiming to ‘elevate it to a place of sanctuary and stewardship’. The spatial design and architectural concept have been developed by architecture studio Eladio Ramm and there’s two sound works emphasising the ‘vulnerability’ of the city’s biodiversity – such as this particular tree – by Yngvild Færøy. From afar, it looks like hoarding but as you get closer you realise you can climb into a sloping timber ground allowing for odd alternative perspectives of the tree within.

The Neighbourhood Index

This is the Triennale’s catalogue of neighbourhood projects, practices, and perspectives. Ongoing, this work aims to contribute to Pagh’s five-year mission: to keep researching and to keep proposing, with the goal of creating more sustainable, diverse, and thriving neighbourhoods. All 236 projects shown were sent in through the international Open Call, launched in Spring 2022. They can be viewed at neighbourhoodindex.org