Embedded Architectures Nesodden

2019 Nesodden master-level design studio @ Vienna University of Technology

The embedded architectures approach aims for architecture and environment integration, with the aim to reconnect architecture, landscape architecture and urban design and linking them to correlated aspects of culture, climate and ecology. The site is Nesodden, a municipality on an peninsula in the Oslo Fjord. Given the plans of Oslo to substantially grow in population, nearby municipalities will come under pressure to densify the build environment. The studio tackled the question how to accommodate densification without destroying the natural terrain and vegetation. This entailed the question of how to relate building types to terrain features, how to locate plots for construction, how to meet the ground with the construction, how to keep circulation space at a minimum and how to provide it by using the existing terrain form. Students where asked to arrange 100 houses on a selected site and to design a small cluster of the houses to demonstrate the viability of their schemes.

Methodologically the studio focused on computational data-driven design, employing data from cartographic sources and from simulations that is utilized in the design process. For this reason students were asked to consider and build-up the general and computational workflow for the design process.

Embedded Architectures Nesodden: development of terrain-specific building types. Tina Selami and Fabian Pitscheider, 2019.
Embedded Architectures Nesodden: development of terrain-specific building types. Tina Selami and Fabian Pitscheider, 2019.
Embedded Architectures Nesodden: development of a computational workflow that maps terrain-specific building types onto corresponding terrain features. Tina Selami and Fabian Pitscheider, 2019.
Embedded Architectures Nesodden: building type #4 mapped onto corresponding terrain features. Tina Selami and Fabian Pitscheider, 2019.
Embedded Architectures Nesodden: rendered view of a terrain-specific building type distribution including terrain-specific circulation system. Tina Selami and Fabian Pitscheider, 2019.

The work of the studio is included in the following publications:

Sunguroğlu Hensel D, Tyc J, Hensel M (2022) Data-driven Design for Architecture and Environment Integration: Convergence of data-integrated workflows for understanding and designing environments. Spool 9(1): 19-34. https://doi.org/10.47982/spool.2022.1.02