Welcome to the Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole blog.
I’m enrolled in the new 2 year English Master Program at Department 2; Architecture, Town and Building. We are 22 students from a variety of backgrounds that will be launching this program. The group is composed of 11 local students (that did their Bachelor studies at KA) and 11 foreign applicants.
I personally come from Ecuador. I did my bachelor studies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, USA. After graduating from school I moved New York City where I was working for the last 4 years. I decided to go back to school to get my Master’s and I found this new program in Denmark while looking at different schools in Europe. The program description caught my attention and decided to give it a try:

MA: Architecture in Urban Context
The Master’s programme in architecture is based on the Danish tradition of holistic, social architecture with an emphasis on field work, self-study and scale-gliding.
Inner-city field work seeks to explore how local culture has manifested itself in different types of dwellings and everyday life as it unfolds in a particular city. By immersing oneself in self-study, the aspiring architect develops an independent viewpoint relevant to the field of architecture. Within the framework of scale-gliding, the student develops architectural coherence by means of simultaneous studies across various scale steps.

This year’s project will be in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. We will be there for 2 weeks analyzing the city, looking for a site and finding a particular interest of our own. We leave for this trip on September 29th and we will be returning on October 13th.

The school opened on September 1st, 2009.
The first week we had a design exercise, where the objective was to engage in Sarajevo through our imagination and the few accessible data. We were also exploring with the method of archiving and collecting data. We were told to design an archive system that we could take to Sarajevo to perform our fieldwork. At the same time we were looking for possible sites and developing a particular interest within the city.



The following weeks we were assigned buildings around Copenhagen for us to perform a thorough understanding of the building and its surroundings. This buildings included the Copenhagen Train Station, Grundtvig’s Church, Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen Town Hall among others.
The objective was to revisit and refine our analysis skills through the use of tools, media and architectural techniques. This exercise will carry on and prepare us for our upcoming visit to Sarajevo. Which I will be posting some images and experiences as we record and explore the city.
Below some images of the school and first year orientation: