Oslo School of Architecture and Design

The Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) is a specialized university and a leading international architecture and design school that provides education within architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism and design. AHOs fields of knowledge focus on design in all scales; objects, buildings, urban areas and landscaping. AHO is organized into four institutes, and has approx. 700 students and 270 employees.

The Institute of Architecture teaches and researches architectural design through a series of focal areas including sustainability, computation, housing and local building. The Institute sees architecture in an artistic, explorative and critical sense that includes but also exceeds the technologies of design and building. Through numerous master studios and a research-based approach to teaching, the Institute provides core architectural competence. 

Post-doctoral research fellow

The Oslo School of Architecture and Design offers a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship within the research project Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity at the research centre OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies).

Within a paradigm of circularity and reuse, buildings may be seen as intermissions in the circulation of materials from their sites of extraction to a future use whose conditions are unknown. Buildings are flexible, collaborative, networked and co-authored entities with often intricate ownership records. Architecture is all about change, function, the passage of time, multiple temporal regimes, fluctuating interests, deterioration, maintenance, and alteration. Provenance in architecture enables the idea of a building as a nexus of material, social, technological, environmental, and geo-political practices.

The concept of recyclability focuses on the potential for materials, building elements, and structural systems to be refashioned and repurposed both on site and when transported to different locations. This situation probes studies spanning from sources of extraction, production facilities, and global transportation networks, to the re-evaluation of building debris and demolition waste. It also probes in-depth historical studies of the history of materials, products and components (unique or mass-produced) to posit the futurity and future circuits of buildings, and to understand architecture as densely textured constellations of past, present, and future within changing regimes of values and revalorization.

We are looking for an emerging scholar with a well-defined project (to be developed with the group) that presents original, conceptual and practical ideas to investigate the social, material and historical lives of buildings and their future potentials. The proposal should suggest a selection of possible buildings/building systems, across chronologies and geographies. An archival impetus is crucial to the work: spanning from public/private archives, publications (such as building and trade journals), but also the building itself as a living archive and depository.

Provenance Projected. Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity is situated in the distinctly multidisciplinary field of architecture and involves practitioners, historians, theoreticians, and artists. The project sets out to explore the ways in which the concept of provenance may carry a forward-bound, dynamic, and productive significance. Anchored in the architectural humanities it aims at theorizing and demonstrating a new operative field to understand how architecture and building materials in a most concrete sense are distributed, appropriated, altered, reinvented and evaluated according to various settings, ideals and ethics, and to identify and develop provenance-based models and analytical tools that are applicable in a wider field.

Provenance Projected (2023–2027) is funded by the Norwegian Research Council, and is directed by Mari Lending, professor in architectural history and theory. For questions please contact mari.lending@aho.no.

Qualifications

The candidate must hold a PhD in architecture or a related discipline (art history, anthropology, digital humanities, heritage studies, etc.), and must demonstrate experience in working with archives. The post-holder will become a key member of the team.

Candidates will be supported with preparing and presenting papers at international conferences as well as publish their research in peer reviewed journals and elsewhere.

The candidate must be able to:

• Present an original, high-quality research project of scholarly merit, relevance, and level of theoretical and methodological sophistication and a plan for high-quality individual, collaborative and/or inter-disciplinary scholarly work.
• Demonstrate research expertise, and a strong record of scholarly achievement in any area of architectural humanities or social sciences.
• Demonstrate personal suitability and motivation.
• Document academic and personal ability to carry out the project, and potential to contributing to the project’s academic development.
• Demonstrate commitment to collegiality and the ability to work as part of a multidisciplinary academic team.
• Demonstrate excellent communication skills.

The application must include

• An application letter describing relevant background, motivation, research experience and network (two A4 pages maximum).
•  A tentative project outline of maximum 5 pages, formulating and discussing research tasks, types of problems, methodology.
•  CV
• Certified copies of educational certificates, transcript of records, diplomas
• Examples of work written by the applicant with relevance to the research project. Five works maximum.
• 2 references (name, relation to candidate, e-mail address and telephone number)

Please note that all documentation must be in English or a Scandinavian language.

Applications who do not fulfil the formal requirements will not be considered. Attachments beyond the required documents will not be taken into consideration.

The material for the Post-Doc application will be assessed according to the following criteria:

• The quality of the project description (outline)
• The applicant's suitability for the research tasks, based on previous practical and academic work.
•  The academic competence of the applicant

We offer

The Post Doc is fully funded. The salary is 635 400 NKR for a full position. From the salary, there will be a mandatory deduction of 2 % as a contribution to the State Pension fund (SPK). Standard employment conditions for state employees in Norway apply for the position.

Office space in a professionally stimulating working environment.

Attractive welfare benefits and generous pension agreement, in addition to Oslo’s family-friendly environment with its rich opportunities for culture and outdoor activities.

Starting date: early 2024

 Contact information

For questions please contact:

• Mari Ledning, professor in architectural theory and history, and a founding member of OCCAS, mari.lending@aho.no

Apply for position