Mari Hvattum: Mutable Places: Light as Ortsversetzung by

The Royal Danish Academy are very pleased to invite everyone to the open public lecture Mutable Places: Light as Ortsversetzung by Mari Hvattum, professor of architectural history and theory at  Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). 

Is light a reliable and authentic marker of place? Certainly, in Christian Norberg-Schulz’s eulogy to the Nordic light or Bernard Tschumi’s celebration of the unique Attic light in his 2009 Parthenon museum, light seems to radiate directly from the genius loci. In this lecture, I make a different proposal. Borrowing Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s concept of Ortsversetzung, I suggest that light (in architecture) is a mutable medium, as capable of transforming places as it is of affirming them. Looking at five buildings from past and present, I argue that light is a means for dislocation.

The lecture is a part of the PhD course Architecture & daylight:
Defining and describing light and space in a Nordic context.

About the course
Among Nordic architects there is a tradition for strongly believing that the qualities of daylight in architecture have a special and highly estimated role. Both from a cultural point of view as well as an aesthetic approach the daylight is pinpointed as one of the essential parameters in architectural design together with a ‘sense’ of place, the inclusion of materiality and the focus on human scale. 

The course present various methodologies to explore, describe and communicate architectural daylight design and humans’ experience of daylit spaces. Daylight is a multifaceted topic that can be analysed through a diversity of disciplines. The course questions how daylight is described. Is it in relation to the geometrical architectural form? In relation to perception? In relation to the construction technology? In relation to a philosophical approach or a cultural meaning of light? 

These discussions will be unfolded through an interdisciplinary series of lectures by highly esteemed architects, architecture theorist and philosophers. Through these lectures a broad approach to describing daylight is presented.

Followed by reading of relevant texts and discussions between the lecturer and the students.

The aim of the course is to present a diversity of methodologies investigating daylight design in general and more specifically daylight design in a Nordic context.

For more info contact: 
Louise Grønlund
Anch@kglakademi.dk