On September 30, the students of Master's Degree University of Architecture faced the first workshop of the six that they have in the Master's Degree. This time the workshop was about projects and the guest teacher was the Norwegian architect Beate Hølmebakk.
It was planned as two days of intense work : Thursday and Friday from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm. At first, general expectations were somewhat low. However, they were pleasantly surprised by the experience.
On Thursday Beate presented them with the project that they were going to defend late on Friday. She came expressly for this exercise from Oslo, her city, where she works in the Manthey Kula studio. After explaining the exercise and presenting some useful references, the degree program started to develop the project on time and as realistic as possible.
The exercise consisted of developing a hotel at the foot of the Norwegian fjords. The interaction with the landscape and the consideration of the impact of the construction on nature were aspects core topic to be taken into account during the development of the activity. The program included a specific issue of cabins, and some common spaces in service to them.
The exercise was carried out in groups of nine people. The members were chosen by the teacher, so that it would be as homogeneous as possible: different universities, balance between issue of girls and boys, and most importantly, that it would be issue odd so that in the voting there would be a winning choice.
The two days were of work intense. During the hours of work they had to find a solution to the issues raised. Each member of group had their own ideas but, by communicating with each other, they were able to reach common ground.
Finally, in the final critique on Friday afternoon, the projects were presented with Beate and Álvaro Velasco (professor of the School) as teachers. Both, who were during the two days accompanying the students in the work, raised the strengths and weaknesses of each project. They closed these two days of continuous flow of ideas and decision making to achieve the common goal .
