GK6 Examen Philosophicum (10 ECTS)

The sixth semester constitutes the transition between ‘basic education’, which consists of those subjects which make up the knowledge base which is considered necessary for the responsible practice of architecture, and ‘graduate education’, in which students are allowed to choose courses in order to pursue their own interests.

The task for the sixth semester will be to design a building which is to embody the subjects covered in the previous two and one half years. In other words students are asked to integrate into one building the knowledge acquired in the courses of the previous five semesters.

The studio will consist of the design of a small public building in a complex urban setting. The building this semester will be a xxxx and the site for it will be in a dense part of Oslo. The studio will, within reason, simulate the complexity of architectural practice by including in its discourse most factors which affect the design of buildings. The studio will emphasise that decision making in architectural practice involves balancing a multiplicity of factors and that decisions are almost never ‘right or wrong’ but emerge from reflecting on a complex, and often contradictory, set of requirements.

From the point of view of AHO this is the semester in which it can evaluate the undergraduate programme through the skills which students have achieved, thus the development and presentation of the undergraduate portfolio will be an important aspect of the work which will run in parallel to the design of the project.

At the end of this studio students are expected to have learned about:

1. The design a small building in a dense urban setting.
2. Developing a critical attitude to the programme.
3. The generation of spatial ideas that are capable of guiding decision making in a complex situation.
4. Decision making involving the integration of complex and often contradictory architectural requirements.
5. Ways to present work in a portfolio which shows the work to its best advantage.

As in most studios at AHO and elsewhere, work will be developed on the basis of a design exercise, set by the studio and common to all students. The development of individual schemes will be guided by tutors on a one to one basis and in group discussions. In this form of teaching there is a direct relationship between the work that students put into their projects and the benefits they get out, mostly because richness of discussions is dependent on the richness of the work being presented.

The studio will be divided into several groups, each guided by a tutor or a team of tutors. Each group will consist of approx. 10 to 14 students, it will have its own character which will emerge from the constituents of the group, and will be the focus where the architectural design is developed.

The sixth semester is the threshold to graduate education. It is the semester in which students have to demonstrate that they are ready to undertake the second ‘masters’ stage of their architectural education; a stage based on elective studios and courses, in which the relevance of choices is ensured by the maturity of the person making those choices.

The assessment of this semester will be based on two main tasks:

1. The individual design of a xxxxbuilding should demonstrate the ability of students to generate good architectural ideas, capable of integrating into one building the complex network of architectural requirements and constraints which characterize the practice of architecture.
2. The design of an undergraduate portfolio containing the work which each student has done during the previous two and one half years and which demonstrates that the student has reached a level of architectural maturity which would allow them to profit from the structure offered byAHO’s graduate education programme.

Assessment on these two components of the course will take the form of individual presentations and group discussions involving studio staff and external critics. Every student has to approve both the building project task and the portfolio task to pass the GK6 studio.

The course is assessed as pass/fail, subject to the Regulations for Master's degree programmes at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, § 6-14.

To come.