Architecture Fellows Install at Oslo Triennale - UTK College of Architecture + Design

January 13, 2020 Architecture Fellows Install at Oslo Triennale

Architecture Fellows Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann were selected to participate in the Oslo Architecture Triennale in Norway in fall 2019. The triennale is the Nordic region’s largest architecture festival and focuses on architectural and urban challenges. The 2019 festival, “Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth,” featured events, performances, activities and installations from around the world.

MacDonald and Schumann’s installation, “Unfamiliar Construction,” challenges architecture’s permanence in response to the festival’s call for “alternatives to the unsustainable paradigm of growth,” according to the festival’s website.

To create the lightweight, easily deployed installation, the Fellows thermoset a geometry of bricks onto red fabric, which was draped to form a series of arches.

“We purposefully misused masonry conventions to challenge architecture’s permanence,” said MacDonald.

“The imprint of bricks gives structure to the fabric, while also transforming the masonry system from one of mass and permanence to one of collapsible temporality,” Schumann said.

The work was installed in October in the Garmannsgården, one of Oslo’s oldest buildings, built in 1622.