This week-long Study Tour to Finland and/or Sweden forms an integral part of the studio curriculum by exposing you to high-quality historic and modern architecture, as well as urbanism in Scandinavia. You will see city spaces and significant buildings in cities like Stockholm, Helsinki, and Turku, as well as architectural patterns of inhabitation in the more natural settings of central Finland. Particular emphasis is given to innovations in spatial organization, constructive and material expression, and the treatment of daylight in public buildings, museums, libraries, and funerary chapels.
The sites visited, as sensory architectural experiences, provide an opportunity to develop your critical observation skills and diagrammatic and representational proficiency. Simultaneously, you will be equipped with a vocabulary of design concepts, strategies, and materials, which can be applied in your own creative work in studio and beyond.
Tour Objectives
- Study contemporary and historic Scandinavian architecture and landscape architecture
- Understand how Scandinavian design culture shapes human experience through the manipulation of light, material, spatial proportion and sequence, and integration of landscape and architecture
- Develop sketching and note-taking skills for recording impressions of sites in a journal
Possible Activities
- Visit early and late works by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz like Sankt Markus Church, Stockholm’s main library, and the buildings and landscape of the Woodland Cemetery UNESCO World Heritage site outside of Stockholm
- Explore different patterns of urban development in Stockholm and Helsinki
- See sites from old and new Finnish architects, from Alvar Aalto and Pekka Pitkänen to Anttinen Oiva and Verstas