The diploma project A Study into Scaffolding was completed at AHO in 2022. Part research and part design, it investigates scaffolding’s relationship with the built environment, taking a critical look at the assumptions we make in architecture by contextualising it as one of several elements of the built environment.

The function of scaffolding as a secondary tool that supports the built environment: it is pragmatic and has a compensational relationship to buildings / monuments. The physical presence of scaffolding somewhere is a marker of maintenance and construction, showing our reliance on these temporary structures to keep the built environment operational. The diploma suggests that this reliance makes scaffolding worthy of architectural investigation.

Applying existing frameworks of value assessment used in preservation onto scaffolding, specific values of scaffolding are identified - usefulness, temporariness, recurrence, and universality. The diploma is composed of four investigations based around these values. Through this lens, scaffolding is analysed and tested on a series of sites in Oslo, with the intention of showing possibilities of how architecture might address, anticipate, and approach challenges of preservation.

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