Northern Grounds

1.

2. 3. 2.

3.

1. The Manhattan transcripts, Bernard Tschumi 1976. 2. Victor Papanek, Design for the real world (1971). 3. Supergraphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon in the Moonraker Athletic Center, Sea Ranch California, 1966. 4. Bella Rune: XYZ at Galleri Magnus Karlsson, 2019. 4.

Teachers: Cecilia Lundbäck, Ulrika Karlsson

Studio Theme The studio will continue its focus on architecture and its representations by starting a 3-year theme looking towards the north – the larger area in and around northern Scandinavia where diverse cultures, ecologies and interests reside across national boundaries. The area holds important recourses of raw materials (iron, wood, oil and energy stored in highly located waters) and industries for their processing. The right to the use of land and water is also a heated and greatly debated question. The studio will engage a series of sites of the north - natural, museal, fictive as well as places in the electronic weave.

This year the studio will have a specific architectural focus on the illusory and instable concepts of grounds, interiors and their coming together as interior grounds. The levelling, construction and elevation interior infrastructures.

of ground marks the difference between the interior and the urban or rural rougher surroundings of a possible outside, a process of domesticating land, engaging both aspects of communal effort and community’s control as described by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. Another account of the architectural aspect of the ground can be found in the mound being one of four elements of architecture of Gottfried Semper.

Teaching Methodology How we work affects what we produce. We focus on design research through making and encourage a curious exploration of the aesthetic implications of machinic processes for representation and production. This will entail deploying tools and techniques of mediation for acquiring, representing, cataloguing and designing - from machine learning and AI to robotic manufacturing and image processing. The entwined relationships between physical and digital, real and virtual, human and machine, continue to produce sensibilities where our understanding of notions of place, image and architecture may be challenged. Contrary to a linear approach where technological processes are applied for optimization, this studio design development. We aim to offer and discuss different takes on how architectural history, theory, practice and culture informs the work. Through design, the students’ collaborative and individual work will contribute to architectural discourse and its dialog with contemporary society, art, popular culture and aesthetics. Project 1 Collecting Points The first project will engage in a design research through capturing, recording, translating and storing of information that will form the point of departure for the design of a new a train station, including a pick up point, a delivery station, a small market, a square and a meeting point in the Norrbotten region of the North. Through critical and explorative use of 3D scanning techniques, the studio will push the idea of architectural representations and the storage of information engaging with the collection of millions of points and moving images. These processes both preserve, repair and construct sites as well as affect architecture’s relationship to crafted aesthetic tendencies that emerge when translating between various mediums.

Project 2 Interior Grounds The collected points, representational techniques and design methods developed in the first part of the semester will be further developed for the design of this new train station or junction. These alterations may critically engage the architectural disassembly and reassembly of grounds, interior grounds, ground as infrastructure, adopts a bi-directional approach where they are instead drivers for

Project 3 Recollection – Hågkomst During the second semester the studio will look into the design of a larger and more complex architectural project of an archive in the north. Archives of the north forms systems and practices of recollection; through archiving and displaying, storing and keeping safe. The architecture, construction and materiality of the archive will be considered in parallel to the archive as data set, as collection of information. To add to the repertoire of techniques for collection and mediation we will use AI - artificial intelligences to process information, images and other sets of data.

Project 4 Archives of the North During the end of the semester the archives of the north will go through a design development phase, where students get an opportunity to experiment and develop a set of representations and presentations of their projects. We will return to issues around the role of architectural representations including moving images in architecture and the concept of the super image and super model.

Cecilia Lundbäck is an architect and partner of the architectural practice Brrum. She is a lecturer at KTH School of Architecture and has taught since 2015. At KTH she is also engaged in artistic research within the field of architecture funded by VR. She has previously worked at SandellSandberg and 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.