The Oslo School of Architecture and Design offers a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship within the research project Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity at the research centre OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies).
Within a paradigm of circularity and reuse, buildings may be seen as intermissions in the circulation of materials from their sites of extraction to a future use whose conditions are unknown. Buildings are flexible, collaborative, networked and co-authored entities with often intricate ownership records. Architecture is all about change, function, the passage of time, multiple temporal regimes, fluctuating interests, deterioration, maintenance, and alteration. Provenance in architecture enables the idea of a building as a nexus of material, social, technological, environmental, and geo-political practices.
The concept of recyclability focuses on the potential for materials, building elements, and structural systems to be refashioned and repurposed both on site and when transported to different locations. This situation probes studies spanning from sources of extraction, production facilities, and global transportation networks, to the re-evaluation of building debris and demolition waste. It also probes in-depth historical studies of the history of materials, products and components (unique or mass-produced) to posit the futurity and future circuits of buildings, and to understand architecture as densely textured constellations of past, present, and future within changing regimes of values and revalorization.
The department is looking for an emerging scholar with a well-defined project (to be developed with the group) that presents original, conceptual and practical ideas to investigate the social, material and historical lives of buildings and their future potentials. The proposal should suggest a selection of possible buildings/building systems, across chronologies and geographies. An archival impetus is crucial to the work: spanning from public/private archives, publications (such as building and trade journals), but also the building itself as a living archive and depository.
Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity is situated in the distinctly multidisciplinary field of architecture and involves practitioners, historians, theoreticians, and artists. The project sets out to explore the ways in which the concept of provenance may carry a forward-bound, dynamic, and productive significance. Anchored in the architectural humanities it aims at theorizing and demonstrating a new operative field to understand how architecture and building materials in a most concrete sense are distributed, appropriated, altered, reinvented and evaluated according to various settings, ideals and ethics, and to identify and develop provenance-based models and analytical tools that are applicable in a wider field.
Provenance Projected (2023–2027) is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and is directed by Mari Lending, professor in architectural history and theory. For questions please contact mari.lending@aho.no.
More information can be found in the full job description here.