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

Lets talk about the fire in front of the hearth

Lærdal, located at the head of Sognefjorden, is the driest place in Norway, with 20% of Bergen’s precipitation falls on it. Due to its geographical location behind the mountain, it suffers from rain shadow effect and föhn effect in winter, which contributes to its dry climate. Meanwhile, the winter in 2014 was exceptionally dry, with only 20% of its usual precipitation, and windy. At the end, a ﬁre started in a house next to the ﬁre station eventually spread to the west with the strong and dry Easteries.


The ﬁre in Lærdal 2014 broke out on Lærdalsøyri on the evening of 18 January 2014, spread rapidly in strong winds and took on the character of a city ﬁre. It claimed no lives, but damaged at least 60 buildings, 42 of which were completely damaged. The ﬁre in Lærdal is the largest town/townﬁre in Norway since World War II, and the largest in peacetime since 1923. The ﬁre was the ﬁrst of the three on a Norwegian scale of very large ﬁres in the west in the winter of 2014.

Lets talk about the fire in front of the hearth

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