Housing

Teachers: Cecilia Lundbäck, Ulrika Karlsson

Studio Theme The studio will continue its focus on architecture and its representations and the 3-year endeavor of looking towards the North – the larger area in northern Scandinavia of diverse cultures, ecologies, histories and agencies. The area holds a long tradition of reindeer herding and many strategic resources of raw materials (iron, wood, oil and water) and infrastructure for their processing. The right to the use of land and water is a heated and greatly debated question. With a modern and colonial history that has reshaped the grounds, these northern “critical zones” are again subject to infrastructural and climatic changes. With a caring respect to situations, the studio will engage a series of sites of the north natural, museal, fictive as well as places in the electronic weave. The architectural focus will be to explore ways of working with that which already exists, to reuse, through disassembling, picking apart, reassembling, and architecturally making unexpected connections and proximities.

Teaching Methodology How we work affects what we produce. With a focus on research through making, a central interest of the studio is the role of representation in architecture. This interest is inserted within contemporary approaches (often labeled as post-digital) emphasizing the entanglements of the physical with the virtual and their effects on how we picture, understand, and make architecture. We encourage a curious approach to technology and continually engage machinic processes in design work - such as LiDAR scanning, drone filming, photogrammetry, animation, algorithmic image processing, 3d printing, CNC or other digital fabrication. Through collaborative and individual design experiments coupled with archival research, the studio aims to propose sensible and multiple methods of engaging with places, existing structures and material realities, specified through architectural questions. The studio includes workshops with invited guests that will target specific conceptual, technical and aesthetic techniques and recurring pin-ups, reading seminars and studio discussions to support students to contextualize their work and engage in contemporary architectural discourse. Project 1 Plotting of Critical Zones During the fall semester, we’ll develop ways of sensitively gathering and assembling research on a series of contested natural and infrastructural sites along Lule älv. The river runs through several natural reserves, Sami grounds, and is the destination of thousands of mountain tourists. Also, it is one of Sweden’s most exploited and productive waters for hydroelectricity. We will make a longer visit to the north, studying this area up close through field work, drone filming, LiDAR scanning and archival studies. The outcome will be highly detailed and multilayered representations, in drawing and physical model.

Project 2 Abattoir Drawing from the multilayered knowledge gained on critical zones around Lule älv, it will entail a careful and detailed architectural design for an integrated reindeer and game butchery in Jokkmokk. The program aims to support the activities of reindeer husbandry of the Sami, which have existed for several thousand years and have developed in close proximity to natural conditions of the subarctic landscape. Students will in detail study spatial, tectonic and aesthetic ad hoc, informal and unexpected connections.

Project 3 Harboring Moving our focus further north and to the lobed Atlantic coast, the spring semester will engage a comprehensive architectural project as a public infrastructure in and around Tromsø. The studio will look into architectural possibilities of exploring structural logics with an ambition of reuse and resourceful thinking around local construction materials. Students will be supported in formulating and structuring their own spring brief and research agenda in relation to the overall studio topic..

Project 4 Post-Production The final project will have a focus on post-production, where the students are asked to deepen representational methods and develop a set of intensive representations of their spring projects. We will return to issues around the role of architectural images including a focus on film and moving images for conveying architectural ideas. The last project will also result in a publication.

Cecilia Lundbäck CL is an architect and founding partner of the architectural practice Brrum. During the academic year 21/22, she was a guest professor at Syracuse University, Florence. She is a lecturer in Architecture at KTH and has taught design studios since 2015. CL is also engaged in within the artistic research project Interiors Matter: A Live Interior.v Ulrika Karlsson UK is an architect and landscape architect, partner of the architectural practice Brrum as well as of Servo Stockholm. She is a Professor in Architecture at the KTH School of Architecture and currently a Guest Professor at Städelschule, Frankfurt. At KTH she is engaged in artistic research within the field of architecture funded by VR.

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1. Studio project spring 22, Puqiao Liu 2. Studio project Positional Uncertainty, Yilin Qiu and Jimmy Ibrahim spring 2021 3. Stora Sjöfallet, point cloud, Cecilia Lundback and Ulrika Karlsson, 2019 4. Studio project spring 22, Petra Keane & Roisin McConnon 5. Machine Architecture, Max Spett, studio diploma project, 2018 5.