Recently I have produced some drawings to be used to change the use classification of the basement level in a large house on Ullernåsen in Oslo. The basement is actually quite spacious (and was thankfully originally built with 2,1 meter ceiling height internally), but through the years it has never been considered to be a part of the house's permanent living area. The basement is exposed over the ground to its full height on the west facade, and a rental apartment with its own entrance has been created on this side with a larger window. The owner wishes now to apply to change the use of the basement to a room for permanent living formally. The plan of this basement is quite unusual. There are concrete walls almost 400 mm thick in some places, and in the centre of the plan is a large iron safe! On the south side are garden terraces on several levels, and the garden features several large apple trees. This house was built on the ridge Ullernåsen in 1936, and it has been maintained very w

Recently I have found the time to make some watercolour drawings of zen gardens, inspired by the temple gardens of Kyōto. The Japanese-style garden is one of my favourite environments, and I have devoted a lot of time to studying its patterns and meaning. Musō Sōseki (1275-1351) was a well respected priest and garden master of the Kamakura period in ancient Japan (1185-1333), and he almost single-handedly elevated gardening to an art form by applying to it the aesthetic principles of Zen Buddhism. He wrote the following poem about garden design: Poem on Dry Mountain (A Zen Garden) A high mountain soars without a grain of dust a waterfall plunges without a drop of water Once or twice on an evening of moonlight in the wind this man here has been happy playing the game that suited him. Watercolour is a medium that is perfectly suited to the spirit of wabi sabi. All of these drawings are size A4. ***

Details are one of my favourite things about architectural design. It is always fun to analyse how a given building or constructed landscape is actually put together and functions. For this reason I have always been a big fan of the "Detail in Contemporary..." series of books from Laurence King Publishing. These books present a selection of details from a variety of projects at different scales from across the world, and I own several of them (including "Detail in Contemporary Timber Architecture" and "Detail in Contemporary Landscape Architecture"). Some of the older editions used to include a CD-rom with dwg-files of all the details as well! Unfortunately many of the newer editions no longer offer this. "Detail in Contemporary Residential Architecture 2" presents a selection of details from mostly small-scale residential projects, especially private houses from places as varied as Croatia, Australia and Japan. The projects are organised according to their primary material: wood, bric

Various pages from my sketchbooks, made over the months of May and June. ***

There is far too much ground covered with asphalt for parking cars in the world. A single normal parking space covers over 12 square metres of the Earth with an ecologically unproductive surface, and it often lies completely unused when no one has parked there. This is a rather silly situation. What can be done with these existing parking lots? I have recently been exploring how new dwellings and residential areas could be built on parking lots, instead of on previously unbuilt ground. Naturally it is always possible to see a site covered with a parking lot as a blank page, and build something there that does not relate at all to the parking lot's strict organisation. In a lot of contexts such an approach will be best, but in other cases it will be necessary or advantageous to retain the strict area limits of the parking spaces. This project is an attempt to test out how this original spatial structure can form the basis for new modular houses, where the typical outer dimensions of a s

A look back through some old sketchbooks. Sketching is visual thinking, and these sketchbooks become a sort of personal repository of thinking from the past.