WOOD PROGRAM · FINLAND

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The Wood Program at the Helsinki University of Technology is a postgraduate program in architecture.

The program attracts young architects from all over the world and focuses on the aesthetic and technological qualities of wood, from forest growth to final engineered product. Study in the Wood Program includes the construction of original buildings, restoration of historical sites, investigation of contemporary production techniques, and the history of wood in architecture.

The 2003 Wood Program participants included Sevra Davis, Adam Guernier, Koji Hashimoto, Max Lönnqvist, Nathaniel Moore, Nathalie Pozzi, Isshin Sasaki and Peter Westerlund.

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Postgraduate Architecture Studies

Academic Institution
Wood Program · Helsinki University of Technology

Location
Helsinki · Finland

Year
2002-2003

 

"The Wood Program explores the technical and architectural properties of wood, providing a thorough and all-round view on the whole chain of wood construction, beginning with the tree in the forest and ending up with an experimental wooden building."

The images show the fabrication of a sauna. The wooden structure is made of pre-assembled elements, to be mounted on-site.

AL-AZIZIAH · SYRIA

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Research Trainee • Conservation of historical quarters of Al-Aziziah, Aleppo

Compiled survey • Neoclassical buildings constructed in Aleppo during the French Mandate

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Postgraduate Architecture Program

Academic Institution
University of Aleppo • Faculty of Architecture

Location
Aleppo · Syria

Year
2000

Grant Recipient
IAESTE

In 2000, this research traineeship at the University of Aleppo Faculty of Architecture marked an early and formative engagement with the built heritage of the Arab world. Funded through an IAESTE grant, the work centered on a three-week survey examining the Neoclassical buildings constructed in Aleppo during the French Mandate period, a largely undocumented architectural layer of the city's history.

The fieldwork extended beyond Aleppo itself, with travel across Syria during a moment of profound political transition: the death of Hafez al-Assad and the transfer of power to his son Bashar. The photographs from this trip capture a country at a crossroads, its everyday landscapes and cultural fabric suspended between decades of single-party rule and an uncertain future that would only fully reveal itself a decade later in the Syrian civil war.

Taken together, the research and the experience of that particular moment in time gave this work a significance that went beyond its academic scope. The buildings surveyed, the streets documented, and the people encountered belong to a Syria that no longer exists in the same form.