AHO WORKS STUDIES 2012-2013
Landscape Architecture Studies
Programme
The Landscape Architecture programme is a two-year master’s programme
with a particular focus on landscape urbanism. In the past decades, landscape
urbanism has been brought to the fore as a saviour of the professions of built
environment. Today, the pressing challenges of climate change, resource and
food security, landscape toxicity and water scarcity, demand design research
thinking combined with passionate involvement of a multiplicity of stakehold-
ers. The landscape architect has for too long been absent from the power and
responsibility circles dealing with matters of the territory. At AHO, the focus
is on the development of operative strategies, which reinstate the resistive ca-
pacity of landscape projects across scales and in relation to the ever-globalizing
homogenization of territories. The program is premised upon a reengagement
with landscape from the perspective of the social and cultural transformation of
territories and the innovative means to strategically reformulate reality. Students
work to develop means to shape possible futures for parks, neighbourhoods, city
districts and the larger stewardship of the landscape. Fieldwork is as important as
design work, and the latent qualities of existing sites are carefully, interpretively
mapped as a part of the creative design process.
The first semester focuses on emerging territories and on the Oslo region,
while the second semester investigates the potential of landscape to structure
urbanization and urbanism at a territorial scale, often out of Norway. The third
semester is more open to the wide array of contemporary practices and chal-
lenges of landscape architecture, and allows students to choose studio courses
from a number of alternatives in the AHO curriculum together with completion
of a rigorous pre-diploma course. The fourth semester is devoted to the diploma
project. Interwoven into the studio-based education is a series of workshops and
seminars that focus on history and theory, techniques and tools.
Programme
