Bergen School of Architecture

Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) is a private University College offering an accredited five-year master’s degree in architecture. It was founded in 1986 as a pedagogic alternative to architectural education at the time, but its formation began already in 1968 as a nomadic teaching model providing informal seminars, lectures, outdoor workshops and studio courses. 

The school’s curriculum is grounded in Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s engagement with ideas of Open Form and the methods developed at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts from the 1950s to 1980s.

Open Form recognises the process of spatial production as both individual acts and collective work. It is an approach to architecture that regards users as individuals and the physical context for architecture as ever-changing. The architect therefore needs to both understand the existing context and through form strive to invite those who come after to keep on adding. This mode of engagement with built form, landscape and society, yields versatile spatial structures that can host a variety of temporal situations. The developing legacy of BAS is rooted in its commitment to train critical/reflective practitioners who engage with and respond to current social and environmental challenges in a professional and responsible manner. 

The concept of ‘Holdbar’ (‘sustainable’) was introduced as a complementary approach for all teaching in the 2009 Strategic Plan to allow issues relating to sustainability to become an intrinsic part of all student projects, academic discussions, research, and development. By tackling sustainability issues, the school shall challenge perspectives in the discourse to climate change and resource management, exploring what it means to be responsible and professional, in situations where diversity and living conditions are at stake, both in local and universal contexts. For BAS it is important to relate sustainability to historical contexts, the natural environment, resources, energy, and climate, while also promoting and supporting a notion that is more strongly rooted in the needs of society. Within this framework, the school aims to widen the attention of innovation relating to reuse, user participation, and regional vernacular building and landscape management to challenge the current focus on green growth.

The teaching at BAS draws on Western Norwegian vernacular building culture that has developed within the context of a particular climate and landscape. During their studies, students experience and have to engage with the different landscape spaces and patterns of settlement inland and along the coast, through a mixture of analysis and practical work such as repairing wear and tear at old boathouses and sheds. Interdisciplinary collaboration with fields such as meteorology, landscape ecology and construction history are important elements of the core education. The school’s teaching emphasises the importance of using field work and societal or situational analysis to set the parameters for design work. By experiencing place‐specific, traditional and innovative uses of materials, we seek to enable students to challenge standard practice in the construction industry today and to develop considerate and sustainable design approaches for tomorrow.

Learning at BAS is an experiential and transformative process based on hands-on experimentation. The former grain silo that has housed the school since 1996 is a testament to the school’s bold explorative approach. Alongside hosting faculty and students, the silo also serves as a cultural arena for larger audiences, public events and exhibitions.