Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Interesting project: Norwegian Collection of Potential Architecture

This website is quite innovative and worth a visit:

Norwegian Collection of Potential Architecture


















A competition project for a Museum of Modern Art in Warszawa, honorable mention, 2007

Below is an excerpt from the program manifesto for the project:

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Mapping the invisible

Thousands of hours are spent on the unrealised every year, both in the professional sphere and in the academic context. An enormous amount of work is produced presenting a future never to be. This work is often inaccessible, hidden and forgotten in the archives or servers of offices and architecture schools. The questions then become; if examining the unbuilt, can one find other ideas and other values? And how can the unbuilt make contributions to the development of the architectural discipline and to society?

Archigram’s Walking Cities, Koolhaas's Parc de la Villette, Mies van der Rohe's Project for an Office Building in Friedrichstrasse in Berlin, BoullĂ©e's Newton's Cenotaph, Le Courbusier's Contemporary City for Three Million Inhabitants and Sverre Fehn's Royal Theatre in Copenhagen are all examples of unrealised projects that have influenced the world in different ways. Never built, but still representing significant contributions to the development of the discipline, of cities and of society.

This is the background for NORWEGIAN COLLECTION OF POTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE. With this project 0047 wants to focus on the half-baked, the promising, the raw and the invisible architecture; Projects that miscarried, went over the top, were turned down by clients or for other reasons never became realised. To have an effect, these unbuilt works need to be made visible. To reach its fullest potential they must be seen, discussed and valued. They must surface and become part of our awareness.

That is why we launch NORWEGIAN COLLECTION OF POTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE, an online collection of unrealised architecture, designed as a collaborative online platform with continuously added projects.

A statistical representation and survey of the collection data will provide insight into this undisclosed realm. By using today’s most influential media, the internet, the project also investigates how architecture can be communicated with the use of user-generated systems, networking, news feeds, online debate and knowledge sharing.

Hopefully, NORWEGIAN COLLECTION OF POTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE can be used as a reference for media, clients, politicians, architects and students and hence contribute to the architectural discourse. Together the unrealised projects can reveal hidden potential and knowledge, and create a better and more complete understanding of the current state of Norwegian architecture.