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AHO WORKS STUDIES 2011-2012
Studio-Based
Speaking for the first time to new students
entering AHO, I always make a fuss about how
lucky they are. They have passed strange tal-
ent and ability tests and beaten a great many
opponents. I tell them that we have a teacher-
student ratio of one to eight. AHO can provide
elaborately architecturally designed premises.
Our workshop capacities are spacious and well
equipped. All students have their own sepa-
rate workspace open for their use all day and
night. Libraries and IT systems are continually
updated and well functioning. The school is
located in the middle of gentrified Oslo – a
city that according to international students
is expensive, cosy and has everything within
walking distance and, which, according to Nor-
wegian students, is a diverse international metro-
polis, indeed expensive. Most importantly, the
AHO budgets are not reduced. In this country
that has been financially shielded to date, the
35 government-owned institutions for higher
education still have satisfactory resources, even
to make bold strategic priorities.
What then about the school´s professional
culture, even the AHO identity or identities?
Within architectural education one might
define some different traditions that for the
time are being more or less merging. The young-
est is a tradition of architectural education
within universities, often closely attached to art
history and even aesthetic, cultural and social
theory. These educations tends to be academic
in the true sense of the word, their primary
aim is not to educate professionals for practice,
but to give a formation, often as a part of other
university educations.
Most schools of architecture have, however,
somehow inherited their model from a poly-
technic system. In the modern state, nation
building and industrial development were a
part of the same developmental project. This
required no less than the integration of organi-
sation, administrative and economic questions
with the purely technical and perceptual re-
orientation of the relation between academic
education and societal needs. In short, indus-
trialisation needed the engineering sciences
and even architecture was categorised as en-
gineering that could be taught and learned in
an education adding polytechnical topics to a
curriculum. As Ulrich Pfammater writes in his
history of architecture as part of the polytech-
nic system, the first school that shifted the fo-
cus from art education to industrial needs was
established in Paris right after the French revo-
lution, and came to inspire an abundance of pol-
ytechnics in a late industrialising Germany that
saw no reason for not stealing good ideas. Like
all German innovations and cultural manifestos
in the 1800s, the idea gravitated north to Swe-
den and its recently aborted counterpart, Nor-
way. The new nation with the always so nec-
essary regard to regional policies, established
a full polytechnic school covering engineering
and architecture in Trondheim, symbolically
overlooking the St. Olav Cathedral.
