In an attempt at creating a narrative for the program, I am exploring Blindleia as an interactive experience centered around Lillesand.

Prof. Sørensen, Paal and I discussed this, and I propose an Android or Iphone app for the region:

As a preliminary study, I wanted to map Blindleia.

This is the most traficated boat-route in the south of Norway, and clearly shows Lillesand to be an extremely central haven on the eastern part of the map.

New elective course:

Professor in charge: PhD Candidate Pavlina Andrea Lucas

This course will devote 20% of the overall time to introduce students to the work of the most pivotal practitioners of photography – with an emphasis on photographers whose work is primarily an exploration of spatial conditions.

Subsequently, 30% of the overall time will be devoted to the introduction of the technical aspects of the medium – both analog and digital – as well as issues of choice of subject matter, framing and composition, and capturing of light and time. In order to understand these aspects of the photographic, students will practice them “in-the-field” and produce work that focuses on a particular theme of their choice. (for example: passage, enclosure, movement, silence, layering, etc) This photographic output will be discussed as a group in class during one session.

For the remaining 50% of the overall time students will be asked to choose one of the images that they produced which has a quality that they identify as spatially potent. This quality is to be the seed for the invention of an architectural space which they shall develop and explore through the process of modelmaking (not computer generated).

Professor in charge Assistant Professor Søren S. Sørensen

Design of a flexible cultural center in Lillesand.
The course is a collaborative project between AHO and Lillesand Municipality. The task will be to design a building at Kokkeneset in Lillesand. The building should function well on the site and both as a tourist attraction as well as a center of the city’s population.
The building will have year-round use, and be as flexible as possible to be used by most groups. The project should be visionary in both program and design, but should also safeguard the city’s history, nature, environment and traditions. Students will be challenged both on the design but also to a large extent on the programming of site and buildings. The planning will focus on overarching ideas and program, and will not go deep into detail. It will be a traditional design process, but the course will also focus on how to use new technologies in architecture, but also as design tools and presentation tools. The course work with a real site and a set of real issues. Therefore, cooperation with interests in the local area around the site will be important. The site also has a long history and a place in the community that one has to deal with. The course will hold an open dialogue between students and Lillesand municipality and the municipality’s residents. The course will end in a presentation at an open public meeting where the city’s population, politicians, administration, business and media will be invited.

Æøå

I am proposing a new way of utilizing Litracon;

The prefab elements Litracon currently supplies is limited to:

BLOCK SIZES

Maximum block size:
600 x 300 mm
Standard block size:
600 x 300 mm
Thickness:
25-500mm

However, since I would like to utilize the material in a structural way, and ideally for horizontal floor elements, i propose that a whole element could be cast within a steel frame, and reinforced by steel wires, welded at the junctions to the frame, and arranged in a voronoi pattern.

With the fibreoptic wires laid out perpendicularly to the frame, light would be able to traverse several floors of my project at a near lossless lumen-value, with only the actual occlusion of solid objects darkening the whole program.

A quick sketch:

Thousands of optical glass fibres form a matrix and run parallel to each other between the two main surfaces of each block.  The proportion of the fibres is very small (4%) compared to the total volume of the blocks. Moreover, these fibres mingle in the concrete because of their insignificant size, and they become a structural component as a kind of modest aggregate. Therefore, the surface of the blocks remains homogeneous concrete.  In theory, a wall structure built from light-transmitting concrete can be several meters thick, because the fibres work without almost any loss in light up until 20 meters.  Load-bearing structures can be also built of these blocks, since glass fibres do not have a negative effect on the well-known high compressive strength value of concrete.  The blocks can be produced in various sizes and with embedded heat-isolation.