Scandinavia

This program for third year architecture students consists of three weeks of travel through Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, returning to Denmark to study at the Aarhus School of Architecture for an additional six weeks of studio and seminar work. Study abroad in Scandinavia offers a unique opportunity to experience and investigate a cultural context across multiple nations that share a common thread regarding ecological responsibility, stewardship of the landscape and smart development of the city and suburb in concert. In addition to these contextual issues, the architectural history is rich allowing for close study of precedents in-situ from their contextual response to technical execution. While many works of architecture were visited and studied from the medieval to the contemporary, we primarily focused on compelling works of post-war civic and cultural sites from social housing to cathedrals.

Scandinavia: City & Country

Travel Gallery

Norway | Sweden | Finland | Denmark

High Resolution Architecture

Taking advantage of the unique opportunity to travel through four Scandinavian countries over three weeks, this course introduced multiple ways of documenting and analyzing the work relative to the hand and camera.

The coursework at the Aarhus School of Architecture facilitates the refinement of a theoretical agenda developed during our travel period to apply to an architectural problem down to the details. After intimately experiencing architecture, students design on multiple scales from the city to the detail: architecture in high resolution. To support the design studio, seminar and representation courses provide venues for discussion, research, documentation and constructed artifacts in support of each student’s individual attitude towards the work they experienced. Associate Professor Matt Hall leads the students in travel and studio design in collaboration with additional Auburn and Aarhus faculty.

Student Work Gallery

Supported by readings for discussion on the sites and contexts we visited. Encounters with the work were based in patient observation before judgement and the time to explore on students’ own terms before discussion. Students synthesized a series of deliverables to focus on a particular aspect or agenda towards our new context. Objectives included understanding design as a product of culture, articulating a theoretical agenda based on experiences and values, comparing and contrasting the unfamiliar with the familiar and exploring new representational methods and various approaches to field work.