Dampsentralen

The Re-Store teaching unit offers new perspectives on the preservation, reuse and transformation of architectural heritage from the recent past, with a special focus on the provenance of building systems, components and materials. Taking an Experimental Preservation approach, the unit responds to the challenges of the climate crisis by renegotiating the way we understand, evaluate, and transform the built environment. Through MA studios and seminars, the unit aims to reinvigorate the discipline by challenging the prevailing ideas of authorship, origins and the integrity of the architectural monument. Engaged in a wide range of practices counting archival studies, value assessment methods, restoration techniques, survey practices, model building, drawing, writing and dissemination, the students are trained to participate in the contemporary discourse with a critical mindset and high design skills. Recent studios have focused on concrete, building systems, prefabrication, building components, petroleum and weather. Re-Store publications include the 

Former Re-Store faculty: Andreas Angelidakis, Thordis Arrhenius, Bård Helland, Amandine Kastler, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Andrea Pinochet, Kim Pløhn, Alena Rieger, Bryony Roberts, Ingrid Dobloug Roede, Erlend Skjeseth, Jørgen Tandberg, Kjetil Sæterdal, Léa-Catherine Szacka, Helle Bendixen Trier, Espen Vatn.

Re-Store

This studio was dedicated to weather in all its forms and meanings, as well as its implications for the construction, care and understanding of
architecture.

Weather constantly dominates news headlines around the world, with reports on floods, rain storms, droughts, landslides, wildfires, blizzards and tornados giving proof of accelerating humaninduced global warming. Architecture is all about weather, providing shelter against the violent forces of nature, spurring creative acts of construction and maintenance. Weather is constructing building codes and regulations, turning architecture into a complex set of material composites and maintenanceschedules. Weather is both science and poetry, chronicled through time as surveys and statistics, but also in the form of painting, literature, sculpture, film and photography. Weather is at the center of preservation, activating core questions of the discipline, relating to patina, authenticity, originality, authorship and more. The studio asked for speculative explorations of weather as a broad cultural phenomenon, as well as specific architectural propositions on how to deal with weather in the reuse, transformation and preservation of architecture.

Re-Store: Weather

A snow based district cooling system in Oslo

In the future, Oslo is projected to experience four times as many heat waves as it does presently. As the climate is getting warmer, the demand for cooling systems is set to rise. Traditional cooling methods, such as air conditioning, heavily rely on electricity and are energy-intensive. How-ever, what if there’s an untapped resource already abun-dant in the streets?


This project aims to repurpose a district heating facility into a district cooling hub by harnessing the latent ener-gy stored in snow from the streets. Offering a dual benefit; providing both a green production of district cooling and alleviating some of the snow handling away from the big-ger cleaning facility in Oslo, which is currently overloaded. Throughout winter, snow will be collected from the streets and stored until summer, before being used for cooling production.


The storage will be situated at Rosenkrantz Gate 14 in Oslo’s city center, housed in the city’s first district heating facility, formerly known as Dampcentralen. The building’s existing infrastructure for distributing waterborne heating makes it an ideal candidate for this program. Currently, the building primarily serves as a distribution center for district heating, with much of its 7000 square meters remaining vacant due to as production has relocated elsewhere. Cel-sio, the building’s owner, has shown interest in repurposing the space. However, this poses a challenge due to the lab-yrinthic circulation system, consisting of levels, stairs, and hallways intertwined with one another, leaving the building unsuitable for accommodating more than one actor at a time.


In addition to the new cooling system, the project consists of a new circulation system. The new circulation will inte-grate with the snow storage and provide a new entrance to the various areas of the building complex. Much of the circulation remains concealed beneath the snow, however, as the snow slowly melts away the volume containing the circulation, an almost Hejduk-ian monster, will reveal itself. As the seasons change and the snow volume fluctuates, temporary levels will become accessible or inaccessible, altering the space.

A snow based district cooling system in Oslo

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