Seminar Courses Spring 2025. YR 4/5
School of Architecture
Course codes for seminar courses in advanced level, spring 2025
YR 4: A42SEV
YR 5: A52SEV
AndersBergström TheArchiveofthe1923SkandiaCinema
CatharinaGabrielsson
DavidSelander
JohanÖrn
KatjaGrillner
MeikeSchalk
PeterLynch
ThordisArrhenius
ArchitectureandDemocracy
TheOrderoftheSun
ArchitectureandArt
SpatialWriting
EnvironmentalLearningwithYoungPeople
ExperienceofLandscape
HistoriesofReuse
The Archive of the 1923 Skandia Cinema
Anders Bergström
One of Sweden’s most treasured interiors serves here as a case study for a critical historiography. At the time when the Skandia Cinema was completed in 1923, designed by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, it symbolised the heyday of the contemporary Swedish film industry. Following the introduction of the sound film, and later colour format, the Skandia was redesigned in the 1940s, and suffered further change in the 1960s. A thorough knowledge of its original state relies on the “archive”, which rests with different actors. The seminar highlights this archive material, consisting of drawings, films and photographs, documents and printed texts, as well as the cinema itself.
Catharina Gabrielsson
How does architecture relate to notions of justice, equality and human rights? What are the meanings of democracy, and how can democratic ideals be represented, realised and secured by architectural means? As informed by seminal and/or recent work in political philosophy, art, architecture history and -theory, we will discuss the multifarious ways in which architecture partakes (or fails to partake) in processes of democratization. By critically questioning democracy as a fixed or given entity, the boundaries and content of architecture will start to shift, too. The course will be based on weekly readings and include a site visit. Students are expected to contribute actively to the seminars, present examples and share ideas in preparation for a final short essay.
David Selander
The course will show how AI can be used in real architecture: you will use AI to make a short project. The scope of the project is limited to solar panel architecture. When these panels become cheap, optimal solar orientation can be ignored. Liberated from the sun, a panel generates half of its max output in shade. What will the culture of this future sheet material look like? We experiment with AI to find out. We can now outsource high quality reasoning to large language models: let’s do it. Semi-automatic architecture mass production. First we develop ideas around an architecture of solar power with LLMs. Then we materialise these ideas with a handful of image models.
Johan Örn
This seminar in architectural history invites students to explore the boundary between architecture and art through the examination of a series of prominent examples from mid-twentieth-century Sweden. The focus will be on public buildings and spaces, sometimes the result of a collaboration between an architect and an artist, sometimes the product of an artist working alone. In addition, we will immerse ourselves in the discourse of the time, including concepts like the Gesamtkunstwerk and the Synthesis of the arts. The seminar is centered around assigned case studies and will include lectures, presentation seminars, a written assignment, and excursions to archives and art institutions.
Katja Grillner
In this seminar course students develop their practice of spatial writing and study feminist voices from architecture theory and critical practice. The course contains lectures, writing and reading exercises, peer group discussions and collective writing workshops. Themes of the lectures: Writing feminism; Voice and address; Place, space, situation and dialogue; Academic conventions, and Ficto-critical writing. The seminar aims at enabling students to develop creative and critical tools for feminist interpretations of architecture. Completing the course provides a basic orientation in feminist spatial writing practices within architecture. Further it initiates a personal development of a critical spatial writing practice. The seminar is taught together with the course AD237V.
Meike Schalk, Rebecca Rubin, Emilio Brandao (KTH), Anette Göthlund (Konstfack), and Camilla Carlsson, artist
This seminar course addresses environmental learning and spatial design with children and youth. Course readings and lectures will introduce participants to historical and contemporary notions of urban pedagogies, their methodological approaches, such as walking, drawing, mapping, narrating, recording, imaging, filming, and podcasting, and the spatial and environmental concepts that they have evoked. In groups, participants will design a pedagogical format for designing with young people. The course includes a whole-day workshop with children at Färgfabriken (April 16). Dates and times are 10.00-12.00 on 5/2, 12/2, 19/2, 26/3, 2/4, 16/4 (as an exception, 10.00-15.00), and 23/4.
Peter Lynch
Through lectures, case studies, and readings, we’ll uncover a deeper understanding of landscape—downplaying symbolic, scenic, and picturesque views in favor of ecological perspectives (on the Western side) and energetic, metabolic perspectives (on the Eastern side). We’ll focus upon what landscape enacts rather than how it appears, setting Eastern and Western insights side-by-side so they reveal the strengths and blind spots of the other.
Working in small groups, you’ll examine two Qing dynasty imperial landscapes: the Old Summer Palace in Beijing and Chengde Mountain Resort. Your tasks: identifying, locating, and reviewing primary sources; plan reading/spatial visualization; framing a research question; initial findings. These could be the most complex works of architecture/ landscape architecture ever made. The course requires curiosity, thoughtfulness, and initiative.
Thordis Arrhenius
Although buildings have been reused and adapted for practical and symbolic reasons throughout the ages and across cultures since the beginning of times, the term reuse did not enter the architectural language until the 1970s. As an architectural term, reuse is closely connected to the rising environmental crisis in the 1970s, growing out of increasing anxiety about dwindling natural resources, increased consumption, and changing climate. Initially situated on the fringe of architectural culture- in the field of low-tech, DIY, and counterculturereuse has, in the last decade, entered the central stage in architecture production and thinking and, in recent years, a rich flora of publications has appeared.
This seminar will explore the history of reuse as a concept and practice in architecture. We will re-read canonical texts on reuse as well as identify and critically asses more recent writings on architecture and reuse. Your assignment will be to write a short critical review of a book or built work tracing the evolution of reuse, exploring the terms’ shifting meanings in architecture discourse from the 1970s until today and beyond.
Courses: A42SEV, A52SEV
Spring 2025