The Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies (OCCAS) is a research centre for humanities-based, advanced studies in architecture.

OCCAS studies the cultural significance of the built world, its historical preconditions and its contemporary status. OCCAS looks at the built environment as a site for cultural negotiation and contestation. With material ranging from objects, projects, exhibitions and print culture, to architectural processes, buildings and landscapes, OCCAS insists on the contemporary relevance of historical and theoretical research, its critical potentials, and its urgent function in understanding the built environments of the present and the future.

Projects

Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity

Mari Lending

While provenance traditionally documents the chronological history of circulating objects, and where their origin and ownership may more easily become dubious, this research project proposes three radical operations when transposing the 18th century concept from discourses on art, archeology, and ethnographica, into architecture. Our overall objective is based on the hypothesis that the concept is […]

Piranesi and the Modern Age

Victor Plahte Tschudi

The project Piranesi and the Modern Age explores the impact of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) on literature, film, photography, art, architecture and urban planning in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It evolves around the idea that Piranesi’s etchings more than influenced the modern age, as the idea of the modern as such hinged on continuous re-interpretations of […]

Warburg Models. Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

Tim Anstey and Mari Lending

Architecture, interiors and technological systems were crucial for how Aby Warburg and his followers interrogated culture and memory. Between 1923 and 1958 this lead to a continuous process of architectural commissioning: two buildings in Hamburg before the Warburg Institute’s forced migration from Germany in 1933, and a series of projects in London, including projects by […]

PriArc

Mari Hvattum

Printing the Past. Architecture, Print Culture, and Uses of the Past in Modern Europe (PriArc) is an international, multidisciplinary research project funded by the EU’s HERA program (Humanities in the European Research Area). The project examines the relationship between architecture, print culture, and uses of the past in modern Europe and beyond. Looking primarily at […]

Tracing the Jerusalem Code

Victor Plahte Tschudi

The quest for Jerusalem, earthly and celestial, has had formative impact throughout the entire history of the Western world. As the site of the Jewish temple and the scene of Christ’s death and resurrection, Jerusalem became the axis mundi, the locus of divine presence on earth and a signpost to the goal of history. The […]

Jon Fosse: En bibliografi

Victor Plahte Tschudi
Private Press, 2024

An ability “to give voice to the unsayable” was how the Swedish Academy explained their decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 to the prolific Norwegian author Jon Fosse. The year also marks the 40-year anniversary of Fosse’s debut with the novel Raudt, svart. The occasion prompted OCCAS-member Victor Plahte Tschudi to […]

Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History

Tim Anstey
The MIT Press, 2024

We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, the book considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive […]

Seigmen – Total

Even Smith Wergeland
Falch forlag, 2023
https://norskealbumklassikere.no/products/even-smith-wergeland-seigmen-total-nabok057

This is a book about the recording, reception and legacy of Total, an album released in October 1994 by the Norwegian rock group Seigmen. The album was produced by Sylvia Massy, an international recording legend, in Studio Nova, one of Norway’s premier sound studios. It became an instant classic that garnered raving reviews and unexpected […]

Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

Tim Anstey and Mari Lending
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2023

Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture, a focus that was at once intellectual, visceral, historical, and contemporary. As well as exploring how architecture had shaped systems of cultural orientation in the past, Warburg and his followers were involved a continual process of architectural commissioning in the present. Between 1923 and […]

Style and Solitude. The History of an Architectural Problem

Mari Hvattum
MIT Press, 2023

The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari […]

Mara Trübenbach

Mar 19, 2024
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Mara Trübenbach will defend her PhD dissertation “Material Dramaturgy: Tracing Trails of Dust in the Architectural Design Process” on March 19 2023. The committee consists of professor Judith Clark, London College of Fashion; associate professor Andrew Filmer, University of Aberystwyth; and associate professor Josina Vink from AHO. Trübenbach’s research was supervised by Tim Anstey and co-supervised by […]

Itinerant Archives: Exhibition history

Mar 7, 2024, 6–8.30 pm
Architectural Association, London

Professor Tim Anstey and AHO graduates Cathrine Sundem and Max Svendsen join members of the AAxWarburg postgraduate seminar to discuss the relationships between visual archives, travelling models, exhibitions, and architectural pedagogy. Chaired by Ingrid Shroeder, Director, Architectural Association School of Architecture. The event is hosted by OCCAS in association with the AA Public Programme, and […]

Warburg Models: Round and square tables

Mar 2, 2024, 6–8.30 pm
Architectural Association, London

In association with the AA Public Programme, OCCAS hosts two events connected to the exhibition Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive (AA Gallery, Jan 18–March 7, 2024). Professor Tim Anstey and PhD candidate Mara Trübenbach, AHO (OCCAS), and model make Ellie Sampson join Nicola Barrington-Leach of the Architectural Association in a conversation on […]

Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

Dec 15, 2023, 5pm
Judith Clark Studio, London

On Friday, December 15, 1933, the HAPAG steamship Hermia arrived in London from Hamburg. On board were 531 crates packed with the contents of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the institute founded by the German art historian Aby Warburg: over 60,000 books, thousands of slides, photographic equipment, book stacks, timber shelving, card catalogues, furniture. On the […]

Vitruvius, the North, and the Genius Loci

Nov 24, 2023
Centro Studi Vitruviani, Fano

2023 witnessed the publication of the first Norwegian translation of Vitruvius’ De Architectura (Om arkitektur, Gyldendal). The event concludes a grand publishing effort finally giving all the Nordic countries a Vitruvius-translations of their own. To mark the occasion, The Centro Studi Vitruviani, located in Vitruvius’ hometown of Fano on the Adriatic Coast, invited one speaker […]

Exhibitions

Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive

Jan 18, 2024 - Mar 7, 2024
Architectural Association, London

Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive opened at the Architectural Association on 18th January 2024. Here the Warburg models moved from the powerful elliptical space that had characterized the heart of the Warburg Institute’s 1920s home in Hamburg into the linear space of the Architectural Association gallery, a room not dissimilar in its […]

Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

Nov 30, 2023, 7pm
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg

Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg is the second exhibition in a sequence of three editions, beginning with Warburg Models at Blaker, Guttormgaards Arkiv, outside Oslo in May 2021 and ending with Warburg Models: Institutes and Archives, at the Architectural Association, London (18 January– 7 March 2024). Each model in the exhibition […]
All photos: Johannes Andersen Krogh and Marie Keukeleire 

The Ceiling

Jun 3, 2023 - Jun 11, 2023
AHO, Oslo

Master seminar, spring 2023  Directed by Mari Hvattum    A ceiling is the upper interior surface of a room. Sometimes simply the underside of the structure above (be it a roof or a floor), other times an independent membrane, the ceiling has an ambiguous tectonic status. Miming structure but rarely structural, and often with an […]

Piranesi and the Modern

Sep 9, 2022 - Jan 8, 2023
The National Museum, Oslo

Piranesi and the Modern explores the significance for posterity of the eighteenth-century printmaker and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). While Piranesi’s art was overlooked and unappreciated for much of the nineteenth century, it was rediscovered in the following century. From the start of the twentieth century, his architectural visions contributed to defining the Modern in […]

Warburg Models at Blaker

May 1, 2021
Blaker gamle meieri

Architecture, interiors and technological systems were crucial for how Aby Warburg and his followers interrogated culture. In Warburg’s native Hamburg a purpose designed building, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, was completed in 1926 to accommodate his remarkable library and to disseminate the ideas it generated. In the same year a transformation was initiated to create a […]

Moving Monuments: Rome

Studio, Fall 2023
Victor Plahte Tschudi (course responsible), Tim Anstey, Mari Hvattum, Mari Lending and Thomas McQuillan

The OCCAS studio course Moving Monuments: Rome, continuing in its ninth year, invites a novel take on historical monuments. It traces a selection of monuments through history – as well as history through its many mediations. “Moving” may refer to the actual transportation of architecture but also to the circulation and recreation of monuments in […]

The Ceiling

Elective, Spring 2023
Mari Hvattum

A ceiling is the upper interior surface of a room. Sometimes simply the underside of the structure above (be it a roof or a floor), other times an independent membrane, the ceiling has an ambiguous tectonic status. Miming structure but rarely structural, and often with an unobvious materiality, ceilings offer an unsurpassed field for representation, […]

Subject Matter: Metals

Studio, Spring 2023
Thomas McQuillan and Helle Bendixen

At the cusp of the Anthropocene, we have begun to think differently about how materials are extracted and refined, and how they might repurposed in the future. Raw materials are extracted from the world into order to build, transforming them. These processes are sometime quite complex and involve the participation of industries. Even though we […]

Contemporary Architectural Theory

Elective, Fall 2022
Mari Hvattum

This new elective course surveys architectural thinking from the last two decades, looking at contradictory and complementary tendencies on the contemporary scene. Each week students and staff read and discuss texts on current themes, ranging from the many alleged “turns” in contemporary architecture, to overriding topics such as gender, identity, colonialism, and climate change. Contemporary […]

Centralteateret: Building History

Elective, Fall 2022
Mari Lending and Thomas McQuillan

Centralteateret in Akergaten 38, Oslo is an internationally exceptional composite of theatrical architecture, and a cornucopia of time-specific expressions and ideas. Dating back to the late 18th century, its complex urban and architectural history of additions and transformation includes the work of prominent architects such as Jørgen Henrik Rawert, Georg Andreas Bull, Herman Major Backer, […]

Mari Hvattum

Scholar

Mari Hvattum is an architect and an architectural historian; professor of architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and a founding member of OCCAS. She studied architecture at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim; philosophy and aesthetics at the University of Bergen, and holds an M.Phil. and a PhD […]

Mari Lending

Scholar

Mari Lending is a professor in architectural theory and history, and a founding member of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies). She is the president of EAHN (European Architectural History Network), and directs the NFR-funded, international research project Provenance Projected: Architecture past and future in the era of circularity. She was a senior […]

Victor Plahte Tschudi

Scholar

Victor Plahte Tschudi is a professor in architectural history at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He teaches and writes on architecture from antiquity to the present with a special interest in the mediation and transformation of buildings in print. Tschudi is the author of Baroque Antiquity: Archaelogical Imagination in Early Modern Europe (2017) and Piranesi […]

Tim Ainsworth Anstey

Scholar

Professor Tim Anstey has directed AHO’s PhD Programme since 2013, in combination with teaching and research activities within OCCAS.   At AHO he lead the research project Things that Move (Swedish Research Council, 2013–2016) and has contributed to the OCCAS projects The Printed and the Built (Norwegian Research Council FRPRO 2014–2017) and PRIARC Printing the Past. Architecture, print culture […]

Even Smith Wergeland

Scholar

Even Smith Wergeland is an associate professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, where he teaches architectural history, planning history and architectural heritage. He is the director of AHO’s executive master’s programme in architectural preservation, and from 2022, the leader of OCCAS. Wergeland’s research spans across a number of different themes, including sports […]