Time to Face Place
I want to write about Trudi, the urbanist. In her teaching at Bergen School of Architecture (BAS) she has inquired into how place is to be confronted, not as a fixed thing, but as ongoing and dynamic. Place is at work, and we are there to engage and inquire, socially and spatially.
Neither architectural discussions nor Trudi’s own work perceive space as being empty. It is constituted by multitude relations of sites, but also involves emerging agencies and positioning subjects. It is when this complex transformative state is grasped and addressed as fluctuating and ambiguous, loaded with meaning and sense, that this urban tableau becomes interesting as the starting point of working with precision on urban situations. Trudi contributes step by step to developing a sensitivity for expressions of diversity and ambiguity through the many assignments she introduces at the school. Through this she awakes individual approaches and willingness to engage with this field amongst the students. As one of the few she teaches students throughout the whole length of their studies, and sees her students inquiring into tasks with unforgettable names such as Dawn, Noon, Dusk, Silent October and Secret Place.
She has us seeking places thoroughly throughout days and seasons, through ambulating, repeat visits that reveal numerous readings of sites and situations. For us to understand that place is much more than site and that situation is much more than function, when parameters of change are put into play. She takes us to the arboreta, into the forests or out in the fields to discover small directional changes that reveal numerous subjective ways to grow. This sensibility is easy to recognize in her works, while this understanding for how something grows, evolves, transforms and relates is contextualized in another way, in her insistence on challenging us to explore correlations, complexities and diversity in urban spatial agencies.
With Trudi, the conveying is personal, reading is subjective and interest in the public sphere is sincere. Exploring public place is revealed as deeply personal and becomes a vital experience for emerging practitioners. This is particularly evident in the individual tutoring of our diploma students, where Trudi contributes to a broadening of the discussion on public place with an array of theoretical and philosophical reflections. She advocates how we can only protect by revealing, and reveal by acknowledging the ambiguity of public place.
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Cecilie Andersen Vice-principal, the Bergen School of Architecture.
This text was written for the publication Lucent. Starting with Indigo. Trudi Jaeger, Works on Paper. Published in 2014.