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 builds upon the assumption that Norwegian petroleum production will be phased out in the near future. This gigantic industry will leave behind an enormous amount of structures, counting offshore instalations like oil-rigs, housing-rigs, sub-sea installations and infrastructure, as well as land-based building structures, urban areas and industrial landscapes. The studio aims to answer how we can reuse these remains in a meaningful way, how we determine their heritage value, and how they can form the basis for new forms of architecture. Being the main factor for national wealth and a monument of the 20th century, carrying both symbolic and social value, this industry deserves meaningful memorials.

Re-Store: Petroleum

Mongstad Memories

The refinery at Mongstad is the largest Norwegian processing plant for petroleum and theonly active which is exclusively devoted to the processing of crude oil. It is a cornerstone ofthe Norwegian petroleum industry, scene of the Mong scandal and fables of a Norwegianmoon landing, and workplace for thousands of people since its establishment in 1972.Less known is the story of Mongstad before 1972. Around 80 people lived here; somecultivated the land, others worked at sea or in local small-scale industry. Like many otherrural places in the post-war decades, the municipalities of Alver and Austrheim placed theirhopes in large-scale industry to secure a future for the area, as populations declined during the20th century. The location and natural harbor made Mongstad attractive for industrialestablishment, and initiatives to secure stable industrial employment were largely welcomedby inhabitants. But in a fateful turn of events in 1970, landowners of Mongstad were facedwith a crucial dilemma: To establish operations at Mongstad, Norsk Hydro needed not onlythe pastures (utmark) but also the arable land (innmark). The choice stood between“bygdedød” – the slow death of the village – in the absence of new jobs, or new industrialjobs in a future without the village. By Christmas in 1972, the last houses were dismantled bythe residents themselves, and the refinery opened. Photographs from this period show analmost unimaginable juxtaposition of industrial development and traditional Norwegian rurallife in the same place at the same time.25 years passed before any of the vacated villagers wished to return. But while others mustview the refinery from outside the strictly monitored fence, every five years since 1997 thevillage reunion Mongstadtreffet is allowed to enter the refinery to visit the sites of their past.Through the window of a tour bus, their stories bring to life their old homes, the boathouses,the factory, the sheltered habour, the beach, the heather and all else which is no longer visibleto the naked eye.The project Mongstad Memories deals with these layers of memories and reality in this place:not only the memories of the village that mean something to those who experienced it andtheir descendants, as well as the story it tells of Norwegian industrialization, but also thefuture memories of a refinery plant with significant industrial and cultural value.Mongstadtreffet's bus tour is the framework for the project. Our modified route moves along aseries of architectural interventions at curated points that show particularly significantencounters between the former and the existing Mongstad. The points have been identifiedthrough compilations of maps of Mongstad per 1960 and 2023, studies of old photographsfrom the village and of models of the installations in the refinery, and conversations withformer inhabitants. Our curation evokes fragments of the village of Mongstad while placingparticular value in parts of the existing industrial plant, and when Norwegian crude oilprocessing comes to an end, our wish is that these fragments will remain for the future.

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Mongstad Memories