Studying Architecture on the Verge of Space and Time
In the infinity of space, somewhere between Venus and Mars, a blue planet orbits the sun. Or blue and green, to be more exact. Her surface is broken into immense plates, gently lulled by a viscous mantle, boiling for eternity, oblivious to the crisis of the tiny critters on her surface. The lower terrain is submerged in an extensive body of water, the basis of her tremendous system of energy circulation, temperature stabilization, and irrigation, ever-moving, ever-flowing, ever-changing. Even viewed from space it appears still, drawing horizons and defining shorelines in an ongoing negotiation with the land.
Underneath the surface of the ocean, where it stretches from south to north in the Atlantic, the plates are floating away from each other, opening fissures that have resulted in the formation of a tremendous mountain ridge on the ocean floor. Following the ridge up north, we find one of these instances, a so-called hot spot, that has caused a part of the ridge to rise above the ocean surface, forming an island that is still very much in vivid formation, as it has been for some tens of millions of years.
This is Iceland.
An island of endless contradictions and extreme conditions. The frequent volcanic eruptions have not gone unnoticed by the world — or the country’s 370,000 inhabitants — attracting, along with the rest of Iceland’s lunar landscape, some two million curious visitors to the country every year, tourism making up a third of the national GDP. Iceland is both small and big, having an area corresponding to a fifth of France or three times that of Denmark, a bubbling hub on the continental plates between America and Europe, culturally reflected in the ways of the people who live there. In the context of the built environment, its immense horizons meet the small concentration of habitation along its shorelines. There is an excess of space for a small population, with only 3 people per square kilometer on average, an immense desert mountain plateau leaving the largest part of the country uninhabitable.
There is an abundance of energy from enormous waterfalls and geothermal areas, naturally hot water to heat buildings, plenty of fish in the sea — and the most valuable treasures of the times to come: clean water, air….and space. On the other hand, with no forests and little usable metal on its grounds, the country holds very meager resources for building materials except for sand and gravel for concrete. Most building materials must be imported a long way.
Since the country’s settlement in the 9th-century locals have had to be ingenious when it comes to building. The traditional habitat, the turf house, is an imaginative, refined product of the local vernacular. It comprises a combination of a delicate wooden structure — making the most of whatever timber was available from stranded ships, driftwood, or whatever structural materials people could get their hands on — and the flesh of the earth itself, as these buildings were half-dug in the ground, allowing the earth to stabilize and isolate the houses from the challenging weather conditions of wind and frost. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of the population and its livestock still lived in such houses.
After a swift turn in the national conditions, independence from Danish rule being one of them, war profits, and large trawlers being another, the first educated Icelandic architects started to drift home and the nation moved into concrete houses. This remained the building method of choice throughout the 20th century. Urbanization was swift in Iceland during the first part of the 20th century, turning the capital Reykjavik from a small town of a few thousands at the beginning of the century to a small city, with suburbs, of about 200,000 today. Interestingly, as the world became predominantly urban at the turn of the 21st century, it turns out that most people live in metropoles of around 2–300.000, making Reykjavík an interesting case study. This is especially true in the context of regeneration, which is the main task of the small but spread city. The population density of Reykjavik is so low that it takes up approximately the size of Paris intra-muros. Currently a new infrastructure, the City-line, is being planned, connecting Reykjavík and its neighboring cities through a system of public transportation. This will greatly influence the densification and rethinking of the whole metropole in the close future.
So, a question — how do we make excellent architecture that is fair to both the planet and people, and accommodates our future ways of living together? How can we proceed to plan and build in a world that needs to cut carbon emissions to rethink its methods of transportation and use of building materials? How do we proceed wisely, in the local context, in a site having an abundance of energy resources but lacking suitable building materials, situated so far away from places that possess them? These extremes pose a curious and intriguing situation in the context of a world facing overexploitation of resources, overproduction and overconsumption.
Iceland is a laboratory, a Petri dish for the world and our future.
With that as the backdrop, the Iceland University of the Arts is calling for students in architecture to collaborate and contribute to a quest for appropriate new ways to build and plan for the future. Building on our Bachelor’s programme that has been running since the turn of the century, we invite talented and determined students from around the world to join us on this quest, offering a relevant, invigorating and focused platform to enrich their skill sets and develop into professionals through our recently established International Master of Architecture programme.
Our programme is research-based — each school year is divided into two semesters, with the fall semester dedicated to communal research around a yearly theme, where we, through different research methods and design processes, gather information and knowledge, question, and experiment together. Thus, we accumulate a rich and varied basis for the individual design projects in the spring term. Every year has a specific theme that will address a series of topics and will, through time, build up a time-relevant research base with contributions from students and scholars. The two cohorts of the programme, the fourth and fifth year, collaborate across years and take part in an extensive dialogue with the faculty and invited practitioners, researchers, thinkers, and agents within relevant fields of the set theme of the year. We benefit from the close settings of the Icelandic community, with very short distances between people, institutions, and subjects. In the fall term, we invite a rich combination of colocateurs to convey knowledge into our collective research, using methods of architecture and design to organize and appropriate the research material, preparing it to be applied in the individual design projects the following spring term. Throughout the individual design projects, students are invited to assign consultants from various fields relevant to their design topic.
We see the programme as a platform of a quest for improved ways to practice architecture in a challenging world, where enormous questions are impending.
Although the Master‘s programme is first and foremost a scholarly boot-camp for a professional career in the field of architecture, it is simultaneously an ongoing research hub for the field of architecture. As such, each yearly theme contributes to an expanding basis of knowledge and expertise.
It is, therefore, both relevant and appropriate to start at the roots, in the inherent local building knowledge of the turf. Nevertheless, we will consider this in a larger context. On one hand, while it is crucial to ask tradition what it can convey and teach us about building and inhabiting the extreme, how we can sustainably apply materials and knowledge, and what can be learned from the culture of inhabiting these circumstances? On the other hand, it is also important to redefine and put materiality into question, expanding from the turf and question what is turf in today‘s context?
The theme of the second year will evolve around water, the sea, harbors, infrastructures, shorelines, and water systems, as well as geopolitical structures, each theme expanding the gaze from the scale of the individual building and its context to a larger scale of systems, communication, and co-existence. Thus our students will have the opportunity to experiment and study building and planning on different scales in variable conditions, zooming in and out, profiting from the local situation — but always examining the local in the context of the global.
With the melting of glaciers, the rising surface of the oceans, weather systems out of balance, raging warfare, movement of populations of refugees, migrant workers, tourists, animal species, we need to reboot. Insects and forests are disappearing. The planet needs to become greener. And we must act, not least through the practice of architecture. We offer you to join us, on this hot spot between west and east, at the outskirts of Europe and on the intersection with the increasingly sensitive Arctic region, in the current of the driftwood and on the track of the migrating tern.
Welcome to our Introduction to the MArch Programme and Q&A at the Iceland University of the Arts — online on February 23rd at 12 PM (GMT) — CLICK HERE TO JOIN
About studying Architecture at the Iceland University of the Arts
The MArch programme at the IUA leads to a professional qualification in Architecture and is offered to students with a BA degree in Architecture. The MArch is a 120 ECTS, two-year full-time programme and is taught in English. The programme leads to a professional title, the appointment of which depends on the legislation of each country. The programme is pending approval for European recognition.
We offer an exceptional learning environment in a small academic setting, with approximately 45 BA students in addition to the group of 25–30 MArch students. The Iceland University of the Arts is unique in its spectrum of art programmes, comprising the fields of theatre, music, dance, fine arts, arts education, design and architecture within the same institution. Situated in downtown Reykjavík, the capital of Iceland, the Department of Architecture is housed in the same building as the Department of Design, where our students cohabit with undergraduate students of fashion design, graphic design, and product design along with Masters‘ students in design. Different workshops are open to the students both in our building and in other IUA buildings. The design department of the IUA library is situated in the same building as are lecture halls and multimedia studio.
The IUA is enriched with an extensive and active international network. We offer varied student exchange programmes (https://www.lhi.is/en/international). Our BA students in architecture, that until now have had to finalize their studies abroad, have been accepted into some of the best architecture schools in the world, from Copenhagen, Denmark to Tokyo, Japan. We also pride ourselves in an excellent teaching staff of accomplished and awarded practitioners and scholars that have taught and collaborated extensively across the world, with an educational background from some of the strongest architecture schools across the globe, including the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, AHO in Oslo, Colombia University in New York, AA and LSE in London. The tight-knit society allows for close encounters with practicing professionals, institutions, and relevant agents allowing for a vivid and dynamic exchange of knowledge.
For further information: https://www.lhi.is/en/architecture
