Revisiting THEWOODWAY an an essential excavation of the "processual turn" in architectural education. I activate this work now from a place of deep pedagogical friction—an era where the digital twin often precedes the physical reality, risking the loss of material intelligence. Set against the stark, snowy landscape of Trondheim, Norway, this project emerged as a radical counter-system to the detached, desk-bound design studio. Its necessity lies in its embrace of the one-to-one scale as a site of social and physical negotiation. By involving eighty first-year students in the collective assembly of a massive wooden superstructure, the work addresses a critical mode of attention: the shift from singular authorship to the distributed agency of a community in flux. It is an urgent investigation into how space is not merely designed, but lived into existence through shared labor and the "pedagogy of sweat." The core operational logic of THEWOODWAY is the deployment of a 1:1 wooden superstructure that functions as an inhabitable laboratory. This was not a symbolic exercise; it was a functional system of eighteen distinct spatial interventions woven into a singular structural framework. The material logic was dictated by the structural properties of timber—cutting, joining, and bracing—under the guidance of Professor Fredrik Lund and a team of transdisciplinary professionals. The process unfolded as a sequence of iterative building phases, where the students’ conceptual drawings were immediately tested by the weight and resistance of the wood. The work behaves as a continuous loop of feedback: a gesture made in the morning by one group would necessitate a structural negotiation by another in the afternoon. This choreography of making prioritized the tactile and the sonic, transforming the construction site into an experimental soundscape of saws, voices, and material tension.
Conceptually, the work builds a light scaffolding between the "design-build" tradition and the "open-source" philosophies of the digital age. It resonates with Giancarlo De Carlo’s theories of participation, where the inhabitant’s needs are integrated into the very rhythm of the building. Furthermore, the project aligns with Tim Ingold’s anthropological view of "making," which posits that builders do not merely impose form on matter, but join forces with the materials at hand. This theoretical frame situates the piece within broader ecological and social questions: how do we foster a "collective poetics" that values the experience of construction over the fetishization of the final product? By integrating critics like Tony Fretton and the sonic interventions of El Intruso, THEWOODWAY functions as a multi-layered inquiry into the "infra-ordinary" qualities of architectural space—finding meaning in the smell of sawdust, the quality of light, and the friction of human interaction. As an audiovisual artifact, the project undergoes a significant media drift, mutating from a physical superstructure in a Norwegian courtyard into a fourteen-part episodic video series. It moves across timescales, capturing the ephemeral choreography of construction and preserving it as a portable methodology. The work re-situates itself in every contemporary studio that values action over representation, drifting from the physical faculty of NTNU to the global digital archive of YouTube. It transforms from a static wooden frame into a rhythmic, cinematic narrative that reveals architecture as a lived phenomenon rather than a finished object. This trajectory shows how the project gets re-interpreted in new territorial contexts—becoming a pedagogical blueprint for schools of architecture worldwide that seek to bridge the gap between abstract theory and embodied experience. The original structure may have been dismantled, but its "audiovisual debris" continues to circulate as a vector of distributed knowledge. Rather than closing the book on this experiment, THEWOODWAY serves as an operative launchpad for future interventions in "situated inquiry." What shifts in collective attention occur when the process of making is elevated to the status of the final work? It suggests a new method for architectural research where error is not a failure, but a fundamental building material. This project leaves the door open to new configurations of soft pedagogy, asking us to reconsider the role of the architect as a mediator of collective agency rather than a master planner. It suggests that the most durable structures we build are not made of wood or concrete, but of the relations and memories formed in the heat of the construction site. As we navigate the complexities of 2026, the lessons of THEWOODWAY remain clear: the future of space lies in our ability to build it, together, at a scale of 1:1.
The series, produced by Anto Lloveras / Professor Lund, is more than documentation; it is a piece of experimental cinema that fragments the construction process into 14 tactile reflections.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBrEL4N9mns - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQFtNfrKRaI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB2S8NJFyLk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMh2vlTW3xg - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8cHd-BnCdo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAUThuUeXZU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kUfLfOsx04 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSLdLUNFTq0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_wojxLBeMc - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQFtNfrKRaI - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LWvCEEuJO8 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyWkDfwrutE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLP9b_o1PGU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSFGAHCyuLM - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBrEL4N9mns -
Theory: Pedagogical Architecture • Processual Practice • Improvisational Agency • Collective Authorship • Socially Situated Inquiry. Tactility: Wooden Superstructure • 1:1 Scale • Atmospheric Light • Sonic Landscape • Material Manipulation. Network: Tomoto Films • NTNU Trondheim • Video Epistemology • Episodic Reflection • Transdisciplinary Ethos. Geographies: Norway • Trondheim • Nordic Landscape • Global Digital Archive.
