Sensitive Territories – Moving Village for Local Communities is a design studio project set along the future disused railway between Trengereid and Stanghelle, in the municipality of Vaksdal. Framed by demographic decline, an ageing population, and major infrastructural transformation, the project examines how architecture can respond sensitively to rural change while reinforcing identity, social sustainability, and local life.
The studio begins with a sensory site analysis of the railway as a linear landscape. Through fieldwork, drawing, colour studies, sound mapping, photography, and sectional analysis, students investigate how light, material decay, vegetation, rhythm, and weather already shape the atmosphere of the site. Rather than treating the railway as obsolete infrastructure, it is understood as an emerging cultural and ecological corridor with latent potential for public use.
This perceptual research is translated into experimental model-making, where students explore how emotion and atmosphere can be expressed spatially through abstract plaster casts. These models form a shared vocabulary of spatial feelings—such as intimacy, tension, openness, or reflection—that bridges sensory observation and architectural intention.
In the final phase, students develop small, transportable architectural units designed to move and settle along the railway. Each project integrates atmosphere, program, and construction within the fixed constraints of a railway module, proposing uses related to culture, care, hospitality, or everyday community life. Together, the projects form a speculative “Moving Village”: a mobile infrastructure for shared experiences, demonstrating how architectural sensitivity can support resilient and inclusive rural futures.
