Studio Catalogue Spring 2024. YR 4/5
School of Architecture
KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Please note: Next studio selection will be in the spring term’s first week, January 2024.
Course codes for the Studio projects spring 2024:
YR 4: Autumn A42A13 + A42B13 Spring A42C14 + A42D14
YR 5: Autumn and Spring A52A13 + A52B13
This Mk1 of the Catalogue, published 16 January 2024.
Teachers: Mats Fahlander, Tobias Nissen
Studio theme
Architecture distinguishes itself from other art forms in that the discipline is affected to a higher degree by limitations which the architect cannot control: Besides the simple fact that a building cannot be realized without a client/investor there are social conventions, topographic, functional and technical factors we must take into account. One of the skills necessary to succeed as an architect is thus the ability to react to a given framework in a creative and intelligent manner. Instead of perceiving limitations as unwelcome obstacles we would like to welcome them as a kind of resistance which can release creative forces.
The tasks we will work on are characterized by clearly defined contexts. By making the project briefs quite simple we want to free the students from time consuming analytical work and engage them instead to dive into the design process from the start, using the design process itself as an analytical tool.
A central theme will be the relationship between construction and architectural expression. In order to focus on the connection between these categories we will collaborate with structural engineers who will participate in the studio work as lecturers, supervisors and critics.
Studio methodology
The path leading up to an architectural project is most often more chaotic and less linear than one would like it to be from an academic point of view. At the same time every student is supposed to develop his/her own working method. Hence we do not consider It to be the teacher’s task to teach a working method. We would rather see ourselves as interlocutors confronting the students with insights resulting from our own experience and encourage them to make their own choices – in agreement with the teacher or by rebutting the teacher’s point of view. The starting point or the generating idea for a project can be highly personal and can in general not be judged as right or wrong. An idea is in that sense not discussable within the framework of architectural education. Our discussions will instead revolve around the process of translating an idea into architecture with the architect’s tools, i.e. sketches, models, horizontal and vertical projections.
The project involves covering the ruins of St. Catherine's Church in Visby, Gotland. This initiative is a collaborative effort with Gotland Municipality and Gotland Museum. The church ruin, comprising walls, columns, arches, and vaults from the medieval era, is currently exposed to the natural elements. By installing a protective roof, we aim to extend the ruin's lifespan, enhance its architectural and spatial features, and enable its use for events like gatherings and concerts. The project will commence with a comprehensive 2-3 day study trip to Visby. During this trip, participants will delve into the site's historical context, thoroughly document the church ruins, and explore masonry's structural principles. Emphasizing the interplay between architecture and construction, a key focus of our studio, we will work alongside structural engineers Carl Thelin, specializing in stone and brick construction, and Roberto Crocetti, an expert in timber and steel structures.
Key architectural themes: Navigating historical contexts, balancing development with preservation, and the synergy between architecture and construction.
Drawing and Model Scales: 1:500, 1:100, 1:10.
The project focuses on designing a timber structure, which could be a platform, bridge, or tower. This project is a collaborative endeavor with the KTH Division of Building Materials, featuring Professors Roberto Crocetti and Magnus Wålinder. In this project, architecture and engineering students will form groups to synergize their skills, discussing architectural design through a structural lens and vice versa. This interdisciplinary approach aims to deepen understanding of the intrinsic relationship between architecture and construction in building design. The course culminates with the physical construction of a full-scale timber structure, or key parts of it, in “Snickarhallen” on the KTH campus. This hands-on experience, conducted either by individual groups or the studio collectively, will involve building either an entire timber structure (platform, bridge, or tower) or focusing on critical components, connections, or details within a timber structure.
Key architectural themes: Architectural engineering, engineering architecture, designing within the limited framework of structural and logistic aspects.
Scales of drawings and models: 1:500, 1:100, 1:10, 1:1
Mats Fahlander
MF studied architecture at KTH and HDK in Berlin. His office, Fahlander Arkitekter is located in Stockholm. Besides his architectural practice he has been working as a teacher in different terms at KKH and KTH. www.matsfahlander.com
Tobias Nissen
TN earned his master’s degree at the ETH Lausanne. He has been working on and off as a teacher in the undergraduate and graduate programs at KTH since 2000. TN is a co-founder of the Stockholm based office Vera Arkitekter. www.vera.se
Teachers: Fredrik Stenberg, Karin Matz, Nina Taghavi, Per Franson
Studio Theme
For the spring semester 2024, Studio Stockholm Mania and Studio Architecture and Place will join forces and migrate to an abandoned building on Campus, Drottning Kristinas Väg 67. The situation of being located in an abandoned building will inform both themes and methods. What kind of expressions are produced when the existing building and materials at hand become the starting point? In the near future architects will (hopefully) to a larger extent work with existing buildings and materials. Being located in such a building, the studio will try to understand what this can mean for architecture and the everyday work as architects. Today adaptive reuse is discussed as a new way of producing architecture, but the reuse of materials and spaces is nothing new – the Romans for example reused parts of buildings when creating new ones in quite an unsentimental way. This creates new possibilities, patterns of matter out of place, and strips for example a column of its representational connotations. Closer at hand is the nomadic sami tradition where buildings are dismantled and reassembled over and over again. The joinery and how things are put together becomes the main interest rather than the parts themselves. This tradition lives on today in a kind of arctic adoration of the joint in the shape of duct tape, cable ties or whatever is at hand. An economy of effect.
The studio will try to work as a lab where different approaches will be tested and evaluated – a bootcamp for the imagination and a testbed for new aesthetics.
We will work with architecture hands on. 1:1 test, redo, demolish, try again. Projects will vary in thematics and methods, but share one thing: scale 1:1. We will explore what working in scale 1:1 can do for the architectural project and process.
During the semester we will also study and examine a number of terms and concepts through seminars and lectures. In the spirit of the Studio DKV – learning by doing – you as students, will in smaller groups create and hold small lectures for the studio. Studio DKV wants to be a space where we all learn and explore together.
If we are to stop demolishing buildings and instead renovate and reuse them, what new possibilities do we have as architects? How can this be a resource and a generator for other newer ways to work as an architect and new ways to inhabit our cities? We will use one floor of our new headquarters as a testing ground for future approaches to our already built environment. Looking at it as ground, as landscape, as site will be our starting point in creating new spaces in the already existing. We will examine terms such as “as found”, spolia, wall and dirt and discuss their relationship to the current issue of adaptive reuse or renovation. We will do this on site, hands on and in scale 1:1.
A public affair
Building on experiences from P3 we will continue to explore the building. If P3 was more of an internal affair, P4 will be more external in its character. What can communal and shared space be in a building like ours and what happens when the interior starts informing the exterior or escapes as a way to invite the other? We will examine the notions of atmosphere, measurements and behavior during P4. And again: hands on and in scale 1:1
Fredrik Stenberg
FS is an architect based in Stockholm. He has worked as a lecturer at KTH since 2016. He is one of the founding members in the collective Uglycute and participated in the Art and Architecture Biennale (2003 and 2010) in Venice, and are represented in the collections of Moderna museet.
Karin Matz
KM studied architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Queensland, and KTH (MSc. Arch). She has designed a series of widely published smaller projects as "Karin Matz Arkitekt" and at Vera Arkitekter. Karin teaches at Arkitekturskolan KTH and co-founded SECRETARY architecture office.
Nina Taghavi
NT architect and lecturer at KTH since 2014. Master Studies KTH and ETSAV (Spain). And post studies with FATALE (KTH) and LUCA (Belgium). Project manager in a Paris based office, later in Sthlm. Now she is running NTA, focusing on housing from city scale (area adaptation) to interior spaces.
Per Franson
PF Architect, educator with over 25 years of experience of having his own architectural practice. The focus for Per´s practice has been the built Architecture, the construction of it and to follow projects through to its completion and move in. Per has worked as a lecturer at KTH since 2014.
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The studio will throughout the spring explore different aspects of architectural experience. The focus will be on the fundamentals of architecture; light, movement, scale, proportion, mass/void, geometry, etc. Investigations will be made on the precise and sensitive use of these basic elements together with the organization of space and program. Environmental sustainability, with a special interest in wooden constructions, and social inclusion will be addressed specifically.
This studio investigates different experiences of architecture and conceptions of space in relation to the synthesizing design process. Basic architectural concepts are explored through a methodology wherein students and teachers collaborate in a kind of research-bydesign structure. The students define and formulate their own projects from a given topic and self-program their projects to reflect on the problems and possibilities described in the analysis and definition of the context. The aim is to provide tools and methods in order to give the students an independent, innovative, artistic, professional, ethical and scientific identity. Every project is specific and independent, but also relates to the general theme.
Fundamental dwelling elements
In the first part we will study fundamental elementsofbuildings as for example stairs, baths, kitchens,etc.We will do inventories, study visits, takemeasures and analyze qualities in important reference buildings. We will also investigate and discuss what a home can be, as well as reflect on private experiences and memoriesofspaces.In the second part we will design a dwelling in an un-urban location. The critical studies of the fundamental elements will be transformed into a project presented with high detailed drawings.
Sento in Tokyo
In this project the studio will study Japanese traditional and contemporary culture and architecture, including important concepts such as ‘Ma’ and ‘Oku’. The brief has its starting point in the understanding of the diverse urban fabric of the Tokyo metropolitan area and continues with, more specifically, investigating the japanese tradition of bathing. These studies will be applied in the design of a sento in Tokyo.
Leif Brodersen
LB started teaching at the KTH School of Architecture in 1996. and an Associate Professor since 2004 . He served as Head of the School 2005-2012. He is also a founding partner at the Stockholm-based practice 2BK Arkitekter, established 1999.
Konrad Krupinski
KK is a lecturer at KTH Architecture since 2015. He is also founding partner at the architecture practice Krupinski/Krupinska. He has prior professional experience from OMA in New York and SANAA in Tokyo as well as Tham & Videgård and Wingårdhs in Stockholm.
Carolina Wikström
CW has been teaching regularly at KTH School of Architecture since 2017. She is a founder of the architecture practice Asante Architecture & Design and is secretary general at Europan Sweden, an international architecture and urban design competition.
Teachers: Erik Stenberg, Maria Orvesten
Studio Theme
Living on the Edge: Housing for voluntary communities and involuntary institutions
The Housing Studio will explore and design mass housing solutions for the roughly half a million people (and their three hundred thousand housing units) who are living on the edge (…of the norm, of society, of the urban, etc.) and whose dwellings do not make up the majority in today’s Swedish society. This “edge housing” will be studied through the interlinked concepts of voluntary or intentional communities (Hayden 1979 and Brown 2001) and involuntary or total institutions (Goffman 1961).
In architectural discourse, Foucault’s use of Bentham’s Panopticon to describe the institutionalization of power (Discipline and Punish 1975) is well known. Though this concept is useful, the course aims to broaden and add complexity to the housing question inherent in non-ordinary housing conditions. Further, we see an increased interest in voluntary communities and a push for more involuntary intuitions in the face of rising nationalistic politics across the globe. In Living on the Edge, we will study this question closer, map historical examples, and design additions/modifications to existing and future communities and institutions.
The studio proposes a process of designing mass housing as it relates to structural and material methods intimately tied to a historical perspective while critically engaging in today’s housing debates and sustainability. We think that design through knowledge in material and architectural technology implicates the understanding of tectonics and space. Our ambition is to give students a thorough knowledge of the processes and mechanics of housing in order to upgrade and improve the architects’ role in current practices. The studio will foster an empathetic attitude for the complementary roles of the architect and engineer. Each semester will include a phase of identifying and researching existing examples as well as a design phase proposing new mass housing. Our teaching methodology proactively engages with contemporary practices by making extensive use of lectures and case studies.
Diploma Spring 2024
Please note that the studio is only open for previous (fall 2023) admitted students doing their diploma spring 2024 and is not available for studio selection.
Erik Stenberg
ES is an Associate Professor in Architecture with 20 years of teaching experience also engaged in housing research. He has a special affinity for the Swedish Million Program Era and is currently pursuing solutions to the contemporary Housing Question in the face of climate change.
Maria Orvesten
MO is a practicing architect at White Architects who brings over 10 years’ experience of designing sustainable architecture with various programs and typologies to the Housing Studio. In addition, as one of the architects for Sara Culture Center in Skellefteå, she has gathered extensive knowledge of timber construction.
Teachers: Carl Fransson, Mikael Bergquist
Studio Theme
How should we live? The studio will examine what is the most familiar and yet difficult kind of architecture: the house. We will explore its potential as a contemporary model of living. The focus will be the critical and experimental study of domestic space, spanning from the single dwelling to groupings of low-rise buildings. The ambition is to investigate the conventions and codes of the home and its basic architectural elements - both programmatic and tectonic.
To many the house still symbolizes the most desirable form of living – more than half of Sweden’s population live in one or two-dwelling buildings. Yet, its current model seems at odds with the environmental and financial challenges of today. The aim of this studio will be to reappraise the spatial, social and ecological contracts of the home. We shall explore alternative living models that go beyond dichotomies such as husband and wife, living and work, private and public, house and garden.
Methodology
Through the study of everyday elements and fundamental domestic programs such as cooking, working, bathing, resting, reading, gardening and playing, we will search for new domestic thresholds that can provide a space for both tradition and innovation. Based in Stockholm, the studio will work on the outskirts of the city. We shall test the house within a site-specific context that is ordinary rather than exceptional. The aims are social, spatial and natural. Through modest means we will look at how architectural reinvention can turn the house into a regenerative social and environmental type, set somewhere between archetype and prototype.
During the semester we will build a common archive. We will encourage iterative design, model-making and explorative modes of representation. Each project is expected to be rigorous in research and design, and realistically grounded within its context.
Project 3
Archive
The first project is divided into a set of workshops. We will build an archive of references, texts, articles, and books. We will introduce different tools of representation and working methods.
Project 4
Proposal
We will speculate on what the contemporary dwelling can be today. We will make architectural projects based on the findings in project 1. We will work on different scales: from the communal area with streets and gardens, to the single unit, and down to parts of the unit.
Mikael Bergquist
MB is an architect and writer, educated at KTH and the Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and with his own office in Stockholm. MB has written and curated numerous exhibitions and books. His latest published book is ”Josef Frank: Villa Carlsten” (Park Books 2019).
Carl Fransson
CF received his architectural education from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris Belleville and Edinburgh College of Art. He also has an MA in Aesthetic Theory from Kingston University. In 2013 he founded studio nāv with Thomas Paltiel. As a practice the studio has worked with a diversity of projects and scales.
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Teachers: Martin Nässén, Niklas Lindelöw
Studio Theme
Stockholm´s geomorphology was shaped by the ice during the last Glacial Period and has given the city its unique character, built on little islands scattered in the sea connected by bridges and pierced by tunnels. Although the experience is one of a city embedded in nature, infrastructural interventions are ever-present. The moving of rock has become intrinsically linked to the spatial logic of the city, blurring the boundary between natural and artificial landforms. Current major infrastructural projects will displace 20 million tonnes of granite. An extraordinary amount of waste or, potentially, an extraordinary resource.
The studio will explore what role stone can play in contemporary construction and what continued meaning it can have in architecture. Stone as a construction material is as old as architecture itself. It is when the motifs of timber construction are translated into stone around the Aegean Sea that our Western architectural mythology begins. Whether used structurally or decoratively, stone has both real and implied substance. Contemporary construction mainly uses stone in the production of cement and concrete. The cement industry is responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions and creates a material that is inferior in strength to the stone that it was made from. As we reset our approach to finite resources and their supply chains, we will need to re-examine how we use stone, and again think about it as a precious resource that when handled appropriately can be used and re-used for centuries.
Methodology
We will work collectively and individually to make precise architectural proposals rooted in observation rather than invention. By learning from what already exists – materially, urbanistically as well as culturally – and by engaging with construction and making we will aim for an economical architecture full of character and optimism.During the semester we will meet leading practitioners involved with the renewed contemporary interest in loadbearing stone construction.
Brunkebergsåsen
The first part of the semester will be structured around a series of workshops all connected by one artefact: Brunkebergsåsen. Brunkebergsåsen is part of a 60km long esker, a landform composed of glacial deposits, and forms a ridge that runs north-south though Vasastaden and Norrmalm. Over time as the city has developed substantial parts of it has been displaced though excavation but is can still be felt as a as a kind of spine that runs through the city, acting as a barrier between east and west. We will explore the remains of the esker as a geological, urban and spatial element and survey how architecture has worked both with and against it. We will work to define sites and develop urban proposals that will be the basis for architectural projects during P4.
An Urban Palace
The cross section of Stockholm that is defined by the extent of Brunkebergsåsen culminates in the area around Sergels torg. Here buildings that approach the size of an entire urban block are not uncommon. These urban palaces stand typologically in a long and rich architectural lineage and have proven to be able to accommodate uses ranging between the private and the public as well as the commercial and the civic. Although unified architectural compositions they are mostly encountered in an episodic way: A coffee shop on the corner, a passage, a courtyard. We will develop projects that consider both the whole and the part and develop precise ideas about tectonics and representation as well as experience and atmosphere.
Martin Nässén
Martin is a KTH graduate and is working as an associate at 6a architects in London where he is leading projects both in the UK and internationally. Prior to joining 6a he worked for Herzog & de Meuron and Tony Fretton Architects. Martin has previously taught architecture at London Metropolitan University.
Niklas Lindelöw
Niklas graduated from the Royal Danish Academy in 2017. He is a self-employed architect with five years of experience as a project managing architect at Johansen Skovsted Arkitekter in Copenhagen, and has been teaching, lecturing and critiquing at the architecture schools in Copenhagen and Aarhus.
Teachers: Cecilia Lundbäck, Ulrika Karlsson
Northern Grounds will continue its focus on architecture and its representations looking towards the North – the larger area in northern Scandinavia of diverse cultures, ecologies, histories and agencies. With a modern and colonial history that has reshaped the grounds, these northern “critical zones” are again subject to infrastructural and climatic changes. 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 caring respect to situations, the studio will engage a series of sites of the north - natural, urban, rural, museal, fictive as well as places in the electronic weave. We will also continue exploring architectural methods for working with that which already exists – through modes of gleaning, reusing, disassembling, picking apart, reassembling, and architecturally making unexpected connections and proximities
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 labelled as post-digital) emphasising the entanglements of the physical with the virtual and their effects on how we imagine, understand, and make architecture. We encourage a curious, critical and experimental approach to technology and continually engage machinic processes in design work - such as AI, LiDAR scanning, drone filming, photogrammetry, animation, algorithmic image processing, 3d printing, CNC and other digital fabrication tools. Through collaborative and individual design investigations coupled with archival research and methods for sensitive observation, the studio aims to propose sensible and multiple ways of engaging with places, existing structures and material realities, specified through architectural questions. The studio includes workshops with invited guests targeting specific conceptual, and aesthetic techniques and recurring study visits, pinups, reading seminars and studio discussions to support students to contextualise their work and engage in contemporary architectural discourse.
Studio Northern Grounds will this semester take a closer look at the region of Tornio-Haparanda and the possibility of a shared town hall. Tornio-Haparanda is built on the Torne River delta and has been inhabited since the end of the last ice-age. It is a cross-border town that engages complex ecosystems of exchange, flows and collaboration at many different levels - languages, culture, currencies, emergency services, sports facilities, schools, commercial centres and more. We will set out to ask what a shared public institution across borders can be and what form it can take today. The architectural focus will be to explore compositional, spatial and structural qualities of “off scale”. Off scale suggesting that something is out of scale or including shifts of scale, perhaps relating to the shifting scales between landscape, town and people. With a continued focus on material flows and the resources used for building, we will discuss and deploy different ways of reusing that which already exists.
Architectural Sensibilities of the Off
The second part of the semester will focus on architecturally detailing the design proposal for a town hall started in Massing Off Scale. We will explore architectural sensibilities of the off scale, through the making of vedutas (far views), blow-ups (near views) and physical models. These will be developed in depth using representational techniques of drawings and image making, including rendering workshops. Throughout the spring we will together make a site visit to Tornio-Haparanda and a series of project specific Study visits to acquire 1:1 understanding as well a critical perspectives of built architectural work.
Cecilia Lundbäck
CL is an architect and founding partner of the architecture practice Brrum. As an adjunct lecturer at KTH she has taught design studios since 2015. She has also taught at Syracuse University in Florence. CL conducts research at KTH within the artistic research project Interiors Matter: A Live Interior. She has a background in furniture design and making.
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.
Elena Carlini, Rutger Sjögrim
Theme
Beneath the street, the beach, and beyond the beach, the sea. Wet, in flux, indeterminate, endless. The inability of the sea to stay solid and obediently turn into property, has long meant that it has remained an unstable territory, peripheral to the laws of land and subject to overlapping claims, conflicts, activities and uses. Overlapping systems of trade and migration, of power and control, of extraction and exploitation. Peripheral to land but central to the spread of both capital and empire.
The space beyond the horizon is a dream space, a space of myths as much as of matter. That fantastic other place, where life could be good, adventures be had, the riches endless, etc.
OFFSHORE is a masters level design studio dedicated to exploring the architectures that negotiate the space that leads into the horizon, the spaces at the edge of the sea. We will search for sites, program, and projects in ports, at shores, at the edge of the city, at the edge of land, on islands and platforms, on ships, or in the wetness of the sea itself, at the surface, even in the deep.
We’re hoping to explore the complexities of this space in full, both material and mythical, solid and liquid, real and utopian, and to develop architectural projects that are unconditionally ‘for’ territories, rather than just in them.
Method
The pedagogical aim of the studio is to prepare you for the independent work of the diploma project, and beyond that, for life as an independent practitioner in the fields of architectural design and research. To that end course briefs are not fixed in terms of sites, programs, topic and method. Instead, there’s a general theme and a framework for what happens at what time, during each semester, designed to help you to develop your own way of working.
Each semester is conceived of as one project spanning two courses. The first course is centered on understanding a site or territory, choosing a topic and point(s) of interest to focus on, building a research inventory and an argument as well as a design prototype. The material produced during the first course then becomes the starting point for the second course where emphasis is placed on design development and iterative explorations through drawings, models, and images, resulting in an architectural proposal. The studio mixes tutored sessions with lectures, seminars, and perdriven feedback sessions. Typically, tutored sessions are located on Tuesdays with lectures and seminars on Fridays. The rest of the week is, with some exceptions, left for you to plan as you please.
Elena Carlini
EC has an MA from IUAV and Columbia University, which she attended as a Fulbright Scholar. She has worked with Emilio Ambasz, Richard Meier in the USA and Studio Valle architetti in Italy; she runs an independent architecture practice and has taught at both Syracuse University and Ferrara University in Italy.
The spring semester looks to the Adriatic Sea and specifically to the Italian port city of Trieste, at its northernmost corner. Located on a narrow stretch of land on the Adriatic coast pocketed by the Slovenian border, Trieste and its surrounding territories forms a small Italian panhandle into the former east. It was the main port of the Habsburg / Austro-Hungarian empire, a free trading zone following the second world war, split by the iron curtain, and after its fall a gateway to places near and far. Today Trieste is Italy's biggest port for commercial goods, one of the largest deepwater ports on the Mediterranean, a major access point for global shipping into the Eurozone economic system, and the port is expanding.
For the spring we’ll investigate the territories in, around and intersecting the production shoreline of the port, surveying their complex entanglements, map their pasts, and design proposals for their future.
Project 3
Atlas of Trieste
The first project focuses on understanding the site, the port, the city of Trieste, its relation to Europe, old and new, to the sea and through the sea, the world.
We will map the expanded territories of logistics and trade, the flow of matter and capital, of people, politics and power, of praxis and tradition. We will study the site, the areas of, and intersecting with, the harbor, looking for sites of intrigue, questions to ask, exciting particularities, strange phenomena, points for potential intervention. The research defines sites for intervention and a program. The work results in a conceptual proposal.
Project 4
Projects for Trieste
For this course, the proposals from the previous course are developed into fully articulated urban scale architectural proposals.
Field Trip
P4 kicks off with a study trip to Trieste, organized partly around a common program but also leaving space for you to properly survey your sites.
Rutger Sjögrim
RS is an architect who is based and educated in Stockholm. Rutger is a founding partner in the Stockholm-based architecture practice Secretary and a Lecturer in Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology.
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Teachers: Anders Berensson, Malin
Heyman
Studio Theme
What constitutes architecture practice today, and how do we practice becoming its practitioners? Out of Practice sets out to take a few close looks at the contemporary tangle of architecture, emphasizing the significance of the specific tools used in architectural practice in terms of their effects on the resulting architectures and the consequences of their production, as well as the influence of past and present structures of power embedded within them. By attentively and playfully using, discussing and attempting to challenge the tools of architecture one at a time, we hope to slowly start untangling our understanding of what agency we really have as practitioners. Working out our imagination as well as working an embodied perspective into all experiments, we will try to make ourselves aware of our own points of view, and exercise our empathy.
Teaching Methodology
By isolating one tool at a time and providing frameworks for how our work oscillates between production and reflection, we aim to improve our command of each tool, as well as deepen our understanding of histories and effects that may otherwise be overlooked. As both deliverables and manner of working will vary significantly between projects, we intend for different abilities, inclinations and previous experience within the student group to come to light at different points of the year. Taking risks is key, and failure is celebrated. We’re all out of practice here!
Diploma Spring 2024
Please note that the studio is only open for previous (fall 2023) admitted students doing their diploma spring 2024 and is not available for studio selection.
Anders Berensson
ABis an architect educated at Chalmers University of technology and KTH. AB has worked at OMA, co-founded visionsdivision and is currently director of Anders Berensson Architects. AB is a lecturer at KTH School of Architecture and has previously taught KTH Master Studio, Full Scale Studio.
Malin Heyman
MH is an architect educated at KTH, the Cooper Union in New York and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is cofounder of the architecture practice AT - HH and a regular contributor of writings on architecture to books and periodicals. MH has been teaching studio at KTH School of Architecture since 2015.
Teachers: Marcelo Rovira Torres, Thordis Arrhenius
A central effect of global capitalism is the pressure of change. Urban patterns and building programs are increasingly becoming redundant, demanding change to accommodate new functions and identities. This in turn raises a new urgency for contemporary architectural culture to start addressing the pressure of change in alternative ways.
With the fundamental shift in our contemporary understanding of spatial and material resources, the architect no longer is primarily occupied with making the new from scratch but with making the new out of the past. In the urgent context of climate change preservation is moving from the fringe of architectural culture into its core.
RE-Master addresses the notion of change, permeance and resilience by the mean of re-storation, re-use and re-pair. The overall methodological and pedagogical strategy is to explore the already present, the already built, the already thought and imagined.
Working with already the built, the studio pays specific attention to the representational tools of architecture. In the field of preservation and repair, drawing becomes primarily a tool of survey and analysis rather than one of projection and forecast. Crucial for the work in the studio is to reflect, test and most importantly, advance the architectural representational tools and technologies—to become critically aware of the function of the drawing, the model and the image in architectural production.
In the post-war era, Sweden underwent a massive and impressive modernisation of society that involved large building programmes, specifically in the housing sector. An urgent issue today is how this extensive heritage from the welfare state is considered. How are these buildings – so closely connected to the political project of post-war social democracy – restored and reassessed, in the deregulated market economy of today? How do we understand processes of canonization, heritage and ideology in relation to a recent past?
With a focus on the typological and the monumental, the studio will work with examples of industrial-built and mass-produced architecture, that has undergone major transformations and changes since built. The site for our investigation is a series of typologically different mass housing projects on the outskirts of the former industrial city of Norrköping. Through meticulously executed and speculative design proposals, we will discuss how issues of mass production and repetition relate to preservation and change –resulting in a complete architectural proposal drawn from urban scale down to the detail.
In the final phase of the semester, we will make the findings of the studio public, through site intervention, exhibition and publication, engaging with a larger audience beyond the KTH school of architecture. We will connect our speculative project with the pragmatics and realities of Norrköping, and work in close dialogue with Norrköping city, the housing association Norrköpings Hyresbostäder and other actors – resulting in a studio publication.
For more information, please see the studio publications RE/01-RE6:
www.remasterstudio.com + issuu.com/kth-arkitekturskolan
Marcelo Rovira Torres
MRT is an architect and architectural researcher specializing in the fields of architectural history and theory. He studied architecture at KTH, ETH Zürich and holds a Master’s degree from EPF Lausanne. He runs his own architecture practice in Stockholm today and has previously worked as a guest researcher at ArkDes.
Thordis Arrhenius
TA is an architect and architectural researcher educated at KTH, the Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and the Architectural Association London. Her teaching and research are characterized by a strong dedication to contemporary critical issues in heritage and urbanism where the historical perspective informs actions and strategies.
