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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

The course offers useful competence and experience for the students that wants to pursuepreservation studies at AHO, in the Re-store studios or other. It is a good supplement for the Re-storestudio held by Amandine and Erlend in the fall and my own in the spring of 2022The course is part of the research project “Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in theEra of Circularity” run by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen. You will be involved in this.In a time when existing monuments and buildings are fought over, on one hand demandeddemolished and on another asked to be preserved, there is a pressing need to discuss the premisesupon which our disciplines operate. We also know that we have to reorient towards the reuse of whatalready exist, we need to rethink our methods, working techniques and terminology, and we need toraise the question of how we evaluate our cultural heritage. This elective course aims to interrogatethe theoretical and conceptual frameworks used (historically and contemporarily) to approach thepreservation and reuse of objects, buildings, cities, and landscapes.Different categories of value permeate our culture, and are prescriptive for the ways in which societyperceives its material framework. A heritage object’s importance, worth, or usefulness is subject tofluctuating opinions and practices, as is its mere status as a ‘preservation-worthy’ object. But what,exactly, are the values that prompt the preservation of a monument, regulate its reuse, and allows forits continued existence? Where are these values grounded, and by whom are they defined? How dowe value and sustain the integrity of what is already there in ways that allow for imaginative reuse?Value is an abstract term with a myriad of denominations. This seminar examines the multiple aspectsof “value” that each, in its way, condition the preservation, use, longevity and estimation of monumentsand material heritage.

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