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I’ve been distributing a pack of diferent kinds of papers and asked some Norwegians to relate some of them to Oslo charachteristics. It does not make sense to have the papers here, since there is a lot of touching and grabing, but there are some of the answers I got:
What about you? You don’t need to be from Oslo to tell me.
10-page presentation for an architecture competition in Oslo, for the new library. A close work with L2 Arkitekter, In’By and Fantastic Norway.
One part of Tempo is called the Invisible Attractions. It shows some attractions through such a personal way that they become other things. I hope you can guess what I am talking about when I describe…
…the Colorful Showers
As a city with so well defined seasons - and its main activities strongly connected with them -, the best time to enjoy the Colorful Showers of Oslo (to be honest, the only time they are actually functioning) is between mid-september and mid-november. If you are in town during that period, it won’t be hard to find them: just go for a tour in one of the many parks around the city. The more the wind, the better. And don’t worry about it not being so warm outside: the color this shower drops is actually very dried.
… the Fjord Museum
The Oslo Fjord Museum provides you with beautiful different angles of Oslo Fjord. This museum is so big that it contains a whole transport system to move people around it. At the east aisle of the museum, one can enjoy an amazing view of the fjord from the harbor - even count the colors of the containers, or the number of small islands. At the west end, you may appreciate another view while tasting the best apple cake in town. At the main hall of the Museum, you get sea level perspectives, which are ok but can be too crowded sometimes, since visitors tend to be a bit lazy and not explore this museum to the fullest.
… the Home Food restaurant
This restaurant is extremely exclusive and cannot handle more than 10 clients per night. Here it’s very likely you will feel the real coziness and hospitality of norwegians, enjoy a good conversation and make friends with the people on your side enjoying the same experience. If you are lucky, you will still be able to learn some tricks with the chef himself. His open kitchen is together with the salon and one needs to be perspicacious enough to balance equally the amount of chatting: the chef can get a bit distracted and mess up with the food. The good thing about this restaurant is that you can pay with a bottle of wine or a gift from your homeland. The bad? It works with invitation only.
… the biggest white carpet in the world
Norwegians are crafty and it’s not a coincidence that the biggest white carpet in the world belongs to this country. This piece of art is a must-see because it is so big that it goes up until the horizon and over all the mountains your eyes can reach. Almost every norwegian, in a “dugnad” frenzy over the winter (when everyones joins to create something together), ties the knots of this cold, slippery carpet. Some people love it, some of them are just tired of it. Most of the people I know try to have fun and take advantage of this cold extra layer, before it is destroyed by the warm breezes of spring. Yes, I forgot to say: it is not heat-friendly.
…the itinerant outdoor shopping mall
The company that owns this shopping mall likes to be flexible: in location, prices, number of owners and, unfortunately, quality. That’s why every time this mall opens - and it is open less than we would like it to -, you can see greedy customers running to grab the best goods. If you are late, you might just find crap, and waist the time and effort of finding out where it was and how to get there. Here you will find all sorts of goods and it’s likely you will buy the ones you don’t need. Which is ok, if you can charm the seller and get it half-price, which is most of the fun anyway.
But note: these itinerant malls are open only during spring and autumn. Winter is too cold and summer is too nice to shop. Even in these shops.
Do you have other personal attractions that only you can see? Send it to me!
My shea butter hand cream got a bit crazy yesterday. I was a bit surprised, but managed to capture the moments.
1.The Birdie lamp, from Flux, in Sweeden.
2. This building, created by the architects Denton Corker Marshall, in Manchester, England. (Seen at Dezeen).
3.These images from knight games held by Emperor Frederick III and Emperor Maximilian II in the years 1489 to 1511, found in BibliOdyssey.
I remember reading once that “beautiful design was invisible”.
When I see what the duo Hi, from Switzerland, has been doing in editorial (mainly), I must agree. Simple, elegant and somehow astonishing. And I simply can’t explain why.
Havaianas for Fantastic Norway Architects, distributed during the press opening of the Venice Biennale. Some pairs still available for sale at their website.
It’s chaotic, but I like it.
• Since I am back from Venice, I’ve been putting a lot more effort at my magazine project. I need to present the research and some sketches in a Conference this October, here at KHiO - that’s why this blog has beeg invaded with all the writing, charting, etc.
• And talking about charting, I’m drawing a mental map of what this project will be. As I wrote a bit about it some posts below, I also felt like giving it my shot. It pictures my colonization process, but I will just show you some bits. I have problems with unfinished work.
• I am planning also to finish today a simple portfolio with some of my 2007-2008 projects. One never knows when he/she will need it, right?
• I had a meeting yesterday with the responsible for the Helgeland project. There were some feedback for the logo proposals I sent before summer (have I posted them here?) and another job: a portal. I will need assistance for that, so if you, or someone you know, is a very good programmer, please, ask them to get in touch with me. Email is: renata@renatabarros.net.
See soon!
Has anyone checked out the D&AD website for the year finals?
There are some very well designed magazines to look at. Good examples from every mark in the range between the mass-traditional-magazine-market and the super-alternative-conceptual zine. Here are my favorites:
1.When all comes together
“Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”1
When writing my project, I had no idea it was Psychogeography (among other things) I was interested at. The term, which seems a bit too scientific, specially for someone that had once scored a round 0 in the studies of Geography, is not so complicated.
The idea of Psychogeography was employed in the mid-20th century by the Situationists, a Parisian group of artists, poets and adventurers that had Guy Debord as their self-proclaimed leader. In their revolution where imagination (not men) were to seize power and art would be part of everyday life, they devised playful methods of responding to serious issues of the time such as postwar conformity and the ways in which urban planning forced us to navigate a city.
Their efforts in altering the way that one navigates through an environment aimed at defamiliarizing the city and making it newer and more flexible. “People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke.”, says Debord in his essay “Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography”.
Their experiments were based on different strategies: a set of algorithms (walk 3 blocks, turn left, 2 blocks, right and so on), color codes (start at a point and follow all the red you see), “wrong” mapping (guiding oneself at a place using the map of the other), and so on.
Today the new-psychogeography appropriates from the technology of the gps and wireless for all sort of new projects. We won’t go deep into that subject, since it will be of no use for this project, but the website www.conflux.com is a good starting point for who is interested. No matter if in the new or old Psychogeography, all of them have the flaneaur as their central character, one that aimless drifts through the city, guided not by randomness, but by this organized chaos - or chaotic set of rules.
This new “discovered” city is filled of mental references which will be recorded, in most cases, in a much larger amount than physical locations. Recording the memories of such meandering is the basis of mental mapping, a method consisting of creating spatial references for non-spatial information (mental references).
Everything can be mapped. A map is a visual representation of an area, which is usually geographic, but it also can represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale: sentiments, body, feelings, thoughts, images. And all these areas can be observed closer and closer in detail, providing the cartographer with new information. Regarding this relativity of scales, John Ruskin sparks in me the will of mapping a stone: ‘The fineness of Nature’s work is so great, that, into a single block, a foot or two in diameter, She can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as She needs for her mountains on a large one; and taking moss for forests, and grain s of crystal for crags, the surface of a stone is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill.’2
No matter how deep we go into an investigation, maps will always be incomplete3. In order to make it possible to visually represent information, it must highlight some aspect of an area. This “incompleteness” must not be seen as a floss; instead, it requires that the reader fills in the blank space with his/her own imagination, bringing new layers of interpretation. “What the map fails to supply, the human mind (or human yearning) sometimes has the power to conjure.” 4
We don’t see maps as intrinsically personal and emotional documents, but they are the proofs in our belies in exploration. They take us to places, they transport us to imagined locations, they guide us to knowledge.
In this project I am creating maps and guides that encourage the discovery of feelings instead of touristic spots. How can that be done?
Both psychogeography - the experiments, methods and the results of unconventionally coordinated wanders in the city - and personal mapping - maps, diagrams and schemes of intangible information - have had their attempts. The ones that worked as inspiration for my project are in this document.
1 Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Debord, Guy-Ernest. Les Lèvres Nues #6 1955
2 John Ruskin - Modern Painters (Volume IV Chapter XVIII)
3 Only the 1:1 scale would be 100% faithfull to reality, but in that way, it’s not a map anymore, but reality
4 Hall, Stephen. I, Mercator. In Harmon, Katharine. You are here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. 2004. Princeton Architectural Press. New York.