Archinect - News

Ruimteveldwerk maps 'modes of movement' for asylum seekers in Oslo

2016-09-13T18:30:00-04:00

According to estimates by the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, up to 60,000 people will seek asylum in Norway this year alone, most of them from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Many of these newly-arrived people have little knowledge of where to go to find basic resources, not to mention where to make friends. How do you spread information among a constantly changing group of people who don’t have either the visibility or the vocality of the rest of a city’s population?

For Modes of Movement, one of the 2016 Oslo Triennale commissioned ‘intervention strategies’, the Belgian collective Ruimteveldwerk met with asylum seekers in Oslo to gather information and anecdotes about places they found useful or appealing. They then converted their findings into a city guide, which delineates fundamental resources like medical centers and shelters, alongside places where asylum seekers can simply meet one another and share stories and experiences.

Like the rest of the intervention strategies in ...

Bollería Industrial / Factory-Baked Goods expose and disrupt the banal rituals of airport travel

2016-09-09T13:08:00-04:00

Airports can be hell, as any traveler knows. From endless check-in lines to depersonalized security checkpoints to the dull monotony of waiting rooms and transit halls, the experience of traveling has become something of a 21st century ritual. You’ll (probably) get to your destination, but first you have to go through the (securitized and regulated) motions.

“By means of boredom, oddly familiar scenarios, and the climate-controlled atmospheres of in-transit buffers, the spaces and technologies of the airport relax our sensory spatial apprehension to camouflage the control parameters to which passengers are submitted,” write the Madrid-based design studio Bollería Industrial / Factory-Baked Goods in the text accompanying their installation Managing Distance, one of five commissioned “intervention strategies” of the In Residence component of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale.

Comprising five different physical devices placed around the sleek Oslo Airport in Gardermoen, their interven...

OMA and Bengler rebel against the sharing economy (sort of)

2016-09-08T12:18:00-04:00

OMA teamed up with the digital consultancy and product development studio Bengler—who also converted the firm’s massive data set into a website—to put together an installation-cum-digital platform for the 2016 Oslo Triennale. Dubbed PANDA, the “counter-organizational platform” both critiques the sharing economy and, in classic OMA-fashion, wryly critiques that critique.

A red plastic strip curtain demarcates a space that could have been teleported from the basement apartment of a hacker. A grid of sticky notes inscribed with the names of various sharing platforms adorns one wall, while on another a poster maps their global impact. On a desk a six-monitor computer displays various images of countercultural resistance, tagged and sorted by theme. Next to it sits a bottle of Provigil—a wakefulness medication commonly (ab)used for all-nighters by college students—and a stack of news clippings exposing the ills of the sharing economy.

A special PANDA WiFi network is accessible throughout t...