Mattias F. Josefsson is a photographer, architect, and PhD candidate at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). He has taught at AHO for nearly 10 years and co-founded the first-year studies in the five-year landscape architecture degree at AHO/UiT. Josefsson is a partner in the landscape architecture practice AtelierFelt in Oslo, Norway.
Making Temporal Landscapes: A Visual Essay on Snow, Site, and Seeing explores the relationship between landscape, perception, and the physical act of engagement through a process developed at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) since 2019. In these workshops, first-year landscape architecture and architecture students are introduced to an extended form of fieldwork that aims to expand their initial reading of public space. The essay describes a pedagogical approach, conducted in 2025, that combines embodied experience and material transformation as a way to engage with place.
The workshop highlights the value of fieldwork in design education. By working directly on site, students learn to understand landscape through both action and reflection. The process moves them beyond a first person perspective into a position where space can be observed from the outside. Through images, the body becomes an instrument for measuring and framing. The temporary nature of the interventions, both as photographs and spatial forms, opens a discussion about the relationship between what is constructed, what is left behind, and what continues to change in the landscape.
Cover Image: To Reinforce - 2025 - Lars Hovland
References
Crary, J. (1990). Techniques of the observer: On vision and modernity in the nineteenth century. MIT Press.
Hansen, O. (2005). Towards open form = Ku formie otwartej. Fundacja Galerii Foksal & Revolver.
Sharp, K. (2022). Open fields: Fieldwork as a creative process. In B. Crone, S. Nightingale, & P. Stanton (Eds.), Fieldwork for future ecologies: Radical practice for art and art-based research (pp. 49–70). Onomatopee.
Smithson, R. (1996). Robert Smithson: The collected writings (J. Flam, Ed.). University of California Press.
Wall, E. (2019). What . . . is landscape? Asking questions of landscapes through design drawings. In K. Jørgensen, N. Karadeniz, E. Mertens, & R. Stiles (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of teaching landscape (pp. 15–30). Routledge.
