nomad city aurora observatory 070612

NOMAD CITY - AURORA OBSERVATORY

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NOMAD CITY AURORA OBSERVATORY


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Index 2

Project organization 3

Concept 4

Nomad City 5

Røssvatnet 6

Icefishing 7

Aurora observatory 8

Project 9

Elements 10

Workshop 11

What is nomad? 12

Survival architecture workshop 27

Publications 34

Conclusions and future projects 35


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AUTHORS

Marco Casagrande - Hans-Petter Bjørnådal - Camilla Vivås-Valen

WORKSHOP ORGANIZERS

Marco Casagrande - Hans-Petter Bjørnådal - Jan Tyrpekl - Nikita Wu

TEACHERS

Marco Casagrande, teacher - Hans-Petter Bjørnåal, teacher – Jan Tyrpkl, ass. teacher

UNIVERSITIES

Environmental art masters class of the Aalto university in Finland

Lund university department of sustainable urban design in Sweden

Madrid european university department of architecture, �

Bauhaus university department of fine arts in Germany

Université libre de Bruxelles faculté d'architecture la Cambre–Horta in Belgium.

Mosjøen VGS Byggfag

STUDENTS

Harri Henrik – Schuchin Shen - Essi Vehkanen – Giorgia Larsen – Raquel Pastel - Katarzyna Balcerowska

Guoda Bardouskaite – Gabrielle Blais-Defour – Suzanne Van Niekirk

Giorgia Ceccato – Lill Maria Hansen - Cecilia Spampinato

Ronny Korn – Sandra Hofmann

Greg Eeman – Waldo de Keersmaecker

SPONSORS

Varntresk Grendelag - Sæterstad Gård – Xl-Bygg Bernard Olsen

XL-Bygg Næstby Trevare – Coop Hattfjelldal

Nord-Norges Arkitetkforening


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The aim is to build up a moving and flexible wooden city on top of the frozen Røssvatnet Lake. The architecture is made out of wood and mounted on movable iron sledges. The participating students will realize individual and collective structures and live in them. The nomadic structures will function as a village for icefishing and aurora observatory on the lake.


5 NOMAD CITY

Illustration: Samernas Liv – Rolf Kjellstrøm While the city of Rome built their Pantheon, the nomads on the northern hemisphere lived in moveable and temporary structures such as lavvos, Although serving the same purpose as pantheons they were often regarded as barbaric in relation to western civilization. Today we see the nomadic way of living as more in connection with nature than that of modern civilization, and we can call their structures moveable ecological pantheons. Nomadic societies move according to season, climate, natural resources and the sami people developed a whole range of building structures as part of their nomadic culture. One of them is a house on sledges. In our modern society we find a new type of nomadic societies forced to move by economic collapse, famine, wars, pollution and natural disasters. Our aim is to build a nomadic urban structure in connection with nature.


6 RØSSVATNET

Photo: Ketil Born

Røssvatnet (Sami: Reevhtse) is a lake and reservoir in Norway in the county of Nordland, and has been the site of human occupation since the Stone Age. Its area of 219 km² makes it the second largest lake in Norway by surface area. Without the dam which has regulated the lake since 1957, it would be 190 km² and the third largest lake in Norway. Its depth is 240 meters, its volume is estimated at about 15 km³ and its surface is 374 meters above sea level.

Røssvatnet is stituated in the mountains between the coast of Helgeland and the forests and rivers of Sweden. To the south we find Hattfjelldal with its distinct hat-shaped mountains and in the north Okstindan,with its glacier. To the east we find the river of Uman connecting the region with Sweden, Finland and Russia. (Blå vegen)


7 ICE-FISHING

Photo: Ketil Born

The landscape provides many natural resources. The fish in Røssvatnet is famed for it´s size and quality, Char and trout is the most common fish with sizes from 300g – 3 kg. On the shores and the sorrounding forests we find blueberries, cranberries, cloudberries and mushrooms. Wildlife include grouse, bears, elk, reindeer, lynx, eagle etc.

The city will be designed as cabins for ice-fishing on the frozen lake, but will also function as huts on the shores in the summerseason.


8 AURORA OBSERVATORY

Photo: Tommy Eliassen

The Aurora and the bright summer-nights are distinct features of life on the arctic circle, and at Røssvatnet , many miles from the nearest city, there are no pollution from city-lights and you can clearly see the night sky.

The aurora originates from electrically charged particles from the sun creates marvellous colurs when colliding with earths atmosphere.

As with all natural phenomen The aurora has many myths associated with it.

According to the Sami, our ancestors live in the aurora and were perceived by the Sami as a supernatural force. The northern lights are depicted on rune drums of the noaides, the Sami shamans. The nomadic city wi ll function as an aurora observatory.


9 PROJECT


10 ELEMENTS

1. Individual ice-fishing houses

- ice fishing downstairs - aurora observatory upstairs – skylight - 2 persons sleeping upstairs - two-person design-build groups

2. Public fire house

- open fire on fire-sledge - grilling and smoking of fishes - aurora observatory – skylight - collective design-build

3. Public sauna

- Sauna stove + water heater, washing inside the sauna - Connected with a swimming hole avanto in the ice - aurora observatory - skylight - collective design-build

4. Internet Café

- Panasonic Toughbook or alike robust laptop - Windmill for recharging computers and mobile phones - Internet connection + wireless - collective design-build

5. Drytoilet

- Movable dry toilet or two - skylight - collective design-build


11 WORKSHOP

Time: 5. – 16.3.

The students will construct simultaneously their individual sledge-huts and the movable public units. The construction work will be realized partly on site and partly in the near-by schools. Iron works in co-operation with Olav Storholm.

Students will use basic individual carpentry tools: hammer, nails, saw, clips, rope. Students will prepare for intensive physical work in cold climate.

The participating students come from:

Aalto University Department of Environmental Art, Finland - 6 students

Mosjøen Videregående skole (building) 7 students

Lund Arkitektur og miljø 3 students

Universidad Europea de Madrid 3 students

Bauhaus university department of fine arts 1 + 1 students

Universite Libre de Bruxelles faculte dárchitecture la Cambre-Horta 2 students


12 WHAT IS NOMAD During the Nomad City / Aurora Observatory -workshop on frozen Røssvatnet Lake in Norway the students were asked to comment on What Is Nomad?

Photo: Greg Eeman

1. State of the mind, never ending exploration of the space around us. Curiosity. Freedom of the choices. Everything and nothing. Sky and ground. Sound and silence. Light and darkness. Equality of days. Enjoying of time.


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Photo: Ketil Born

2. A nomad is in move. • He carries all his life in: - His body - His backpack - Something bigger • The pattern of nomad’s constant movement can be: a) Cycle based b) Random • A nomad whose movement is not cycle based is in constant discovery. • Nomad’s connection to the environment is based on opposites: - He is resistant ( A shell protecting from all unexpected and expected unpleasant conditions of the surrounding world.) • But very depending: - Climate - Community - Food - Etc. • A nomad can be lonely or not. • A nomad can have a goal of his journey. • A nomad can be a temporary condition. • A nomad is me.


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Photo: Guoda Bardauskaite 3. Nomad lives without settling for set borders individually in a society connected in motion.


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Photo: Valmar Valdmann

4. A person wandering around installing his / her home to a place giving the best shelter, food etc. living conditions. He / she is constantly prepared to move the “home” in short time and live with the laws of nature.


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5. Native nomad populations were nomadic for survival purposes, primal survival. They were following herds and seasons by necessity. However, nowadays, my vision of what being a nomad is has greatly changed. It is an adopted lifestyle pushing us to follow our desires and curiosity. A “Neo-Nomad”, in my opinion, has an attach, an anchor … but escapes to discover, learn and try. Knowledge of yourself and your surroundings is what you have to gain and gather. It might also be a temporary lifestyle choice, like a backpack kind of hut, or some might chose a more permanent way to keep moving around. But in today’s world, there is something truly liberating in the possibility of escaping the ties of the modern world and start exploring.


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6. It seems that nomads have not local roots, maybe that is right, because they have the space to change – it is only a question of them where is the mental / spirit home of them. They have another understanding of a family life; they have to live for each other, not only on birthday dates or Christmas time. Nomads are the best human parasites in nature; they live with the nature besides for the nature. They are not asking them how achieve more than they needed in the past / not more than the other generations before.


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7. Nomads don’t live in a fixed place not because they can’t but because they want and need changing. Is also something that can be moved, small, comfortable, necessary. It can be also fixed but to welcome nomad people. (or not) Nomad people are the ones who are travelling in a land and take all their belongings with them, even the house.


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8. To me, being a nomad is a way of life – on has a nomadic existence. It implies an understanding of the temporal nature of things. I feel it would be hard to live a nomadic life & to place value on permanence. Ones life would be in a constant state of flux as the living arrangement would always invariably change & it would be necessary to appreciate that if one were final happiness. There have been many cultures of nomadic peoples throughout history & of course it is very easy to romanticise such cultures. The constant changes can seem quite adventurous & while they very well may be, I think there also is steely determination behind it. It takes a great strength to believe that the weather will bring what you need where you are heading & also a great strength to believe in yourself & your family & your community that you are making the correct decisions. I think it would be quite hard.


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Photo: Greg Eeman

9. Nomad is a concept about travelling … The liberty to choose your environment., the people surrounding you. It’s something that makes you close to the person with who you are. It’s a certain concept of liberty. Like a new kind of pirates free to go everywhere (without the stealing). It’s also a way to be really close with the nature … to know how it works and live an experience in biosis.


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Photo: Nikita Wu

10. When I think of nomads I imagine a tribe of people travelling from one place and adjusting to another, for whatever reasons there may be. Even though they carry with them an air of temporarity, their culture and traditions are more than vivid and are enriched every time the tribe arrives and settles down to a new environment. To me not having a solid base is intriguing as it is very different from the society I was raised in. Through the presence of temporarity they seem have given up the security and developing options a solid base provides and gained a quality of life I admire.


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Photo: Nikita Wu

11. Waldo is nomad. No Made - Following the game and the seasons to survive - Change often of site - Easy to build / deconstruct habitations - Community / support / family - Functions for / people different For me, a nomad community is like a big family composed with people not only linked by blood, but by their ideals of an alternative life.


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Photo: Raquel Pastel

12. Nature. Togetherness. In a big “space”. Survival. Patience. Tranquility – thinking. Strong bonds. Family. Being together in a different way than we normally think people are “social” (being together). Since they are a smaller group of people (family, friends) than those you find in a city for example, they relate in a different way – their lifestyle makes them depending more on each other in order to survive and to have friendships. In this way you have to settle with your “neighbour”, even you like him or not – and you learn to be patient and to understand people. Another part is their relationship to nature – since they have to survive and find food, they need to know how “nature acts”, which also teaches them to respect nature. They depend on their knowledge of the environment and all aspects of nature and the earth. And they learn to respect it and its inhabitants.


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Photo: Lill Maria Hansen

13. Nomad is to live everyday life in accordance with the nature. It is the attitude towards the environment that you are in. For me, nomad people respect nature, they try to read carefully the messages sent to them by the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the animals, the sky, the sun, the moon … which are long forgotten by the modern people. Nomad is also the attitude towards the changing of life, which is the biggest fear of the people in modern society. Nomad people accept changes and they choose to live their whole life with changes.


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14. Most of people think that nomads have no culture. They move from one place to the next, leaving every time a background that does not belong to them, to reach another one that does not either. We are used to think that each culture strictly belongs to the place where it was born and developed. It is difficult for us to imagine a culture that can flow and change itself always concerning the environment, different each time and each time dominating but controlled. Instead, that’s the power of nomads culture. It allows them to be challenging the environment and adapting to it, using both the old consistent culture and the really new skills.


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15. Nomad is, I think, a priviledge. It might be started by necessity in the search of basic resources for survival and become there after the only logical way of live. It might be triggered by the alienation provoked by the routine of stably structure lives. But in the end it is limited and controlled by states and borders. In the age of free trade, only money can move freely. People can not. The few that can (we sometimes) are the priviledged elite. But are we nomads? I’m probably not, however much I might move. So there must be something else to nomadity than mobility… A way of thinking? Flexible adobtable, open? A way of living? Without attachement to material things, without striving for escalating in this hierarchical society? Without an end but with process as and end in itself?


27 SURVIVAL ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP

By Alison Furuto, Archdaily

© Nikita Wu

Led by environmental architect and anarchist, Marco Casagrande, representing the Aalto University Environmental Art Masters Program, students were to join in the creation of a nomadic city on the ice, both weathering and embracing the cold and wind, and alternating blizzards and slush over the course of ten days. There were twenty of them in total. In addition to Marco himself, his wife, Taiwanese journalist Nikita Wu, his long time friend Norwegian architect Hans- Petter Bjørnådal, Czech MA student and carpenter- extraordinaire Jan Tyrpekl, made up the organizational team. The Lapland native believes in an almost cruel method to his medium, where human intentions come naturally second to nature’s. It is with this in mind that one needs to approach his workshop on the frozen lake of Rössvatnet in subarctic Norway. More of the team’s description, by Guoda Bardauskaitė and Suzanne van Niekerk, on the workshop after the break.


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© Nikita Wu

A cross-disciplinary mix of environmental art, architecture, sociology and survival, The students were given a task to make a personal nomad shelter and collectively to build a movable Nomad Sauna on skies and an Aurora Observatory. Under the ice there were beautiful salmon related fishes – trout and arctic char. Local Knowledge was needed in order to get them up. The farmers around the lake were generous in helping the students and more than that curious to see if they could manage in the demanding Nordic winter conditions. For the course the survival was not enough – the students had to manage to construct in 1:1 scale and find beauty through their actions in the frozen environment.

© Nikita Wu


29 The sixteen students of nineteen nationalities came from four universities and four different artistic disciplines: Environmental Art students from Aalto University in Helsinki, Sustainable Urban Design students from Lund University in Sweden, Architecture students from UEM in Madrid, Spain and one Fine Art student from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

© Nikita Wu

In the words of Casagrande, “survival is just the first step in discovering true beauty”. Together we were going to create, explained Marco over generous cups of Finnish vodka, a city of subtle proportions: a mobile city for nomads to respect and be humbled by nature. Individually, the students would make their own small ice fishing shelters come aurora observatories. And together we would create two key communal focal points: a large scale observatory and a sauna. As Marco liked to point out, a sauna is, simultaneously and contradictorily, both an indicator of civilization and a chance for humans to return to a more bass nature


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© Nikita Wu

From the beginning the workshop was spontaneous and intuitive. The students were unaccustomed to each other, building processes and materials were unsecured, and we were camping in the local schoolhouse for the first two nights after our original accommodations fell through. Despite the circumstances though, there was an underlying sense of optimism present from day one. The workshop attracted a certain kind of spirit and without complaint we quickly came to appreciate the quirks of having a road kill for dinner, wearing garbage bags as rain protection without the slightest sense of irony, and the joy of merely being out of the wind, even while being completely soaked to the core.


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© Nikita Wu

This was also a workshop about doing. We were encouraged to lay down our pencils and start experimenting with structures. It was about self- discovery, and Marco left us to our own devices. If we needed a consultation, he could be found on the ice, quietly fishing. There was no lack of inspiration, though. There is a rich heritage present in the Sami culture, and many of the citizens of Hattfjelldal were keen to talk with us. Every evening around the fire Marco too would tell us tales of nomadic culture and myths and stories of his childhood. Perhaps the most prolific though was the influence from the nature, it affected both our design ideas and the development of our projects.


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© Nikita Wu

We experienced a massive range of weather conditions — from beautiful, clear sunny days with crisp snow underfoot, to sleet and hail, soggy snow, and powerful winds. With the former solid ice surface of the lake turning into a continuing series of thigh- high pools of slushy ice water, it took an afternoon to move the sauna a hundred or so meters from the shore on to the site. We had envisioned an easy and graceful move, hoping a helicopter pilot at the farm would transport it for us, dropping it into place without so much fuss. Of course, that was not going to happen, it took a combined effort of ingenuity and manpower of the entire group instead. And when it was finally settled, with the observatory in place next to it, we felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.


34 PUBLICATIONS Survival Architecture Workshop - Alison Furuto. Arch Daily. 5/2012 Survival Architecture Workshop - VOID+FORM建築設計事務所. Japan. 5/2012 Survival Architecture Workshop - Le Post-It Jaune. 5/2012 Marco Casagrande: nomad city - aurora observatory - Richelle. Designboom. 6/2012 Nomad city - Aurora observatory – кочевой город в норвежских горах - Novate. Russia. 6/2012 Marco Casagrande - Nomad City - Aurora Observatory - Emmanuel Chaussade. Aima007. Luxembourg. 6/2012


35 SUMMARY AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

The workshop achieved its aims in building a nomad city on top of the frozen lake of Røssvatnet. The structures built during the workshop is in use by the local community. It was also a success in terms of building a knowledge base around nomadic living in arctic conditions. Also the students acquired a sense of mastering the conditions and they want more. The project has received international publicity and there is a big demand for this kind of research.

Future perspectives include building a crossdiciplinary platform including a research + design center in the region of Helgeland. This crossdiciplinary platform will include bases by the mountain and the sea, and will focus on arctic landscape, open form, urban acupuncture, nomadic living and local knowledge in cooperation with international universities. We have already begun planning for future workshops in the winter and summer of 2013.

nomad city aurora observatory 070612

Design

teacher hans

aalto university

petter bjrnal

survival architecture

project organization

future projects