Architectural Theory, History and Critical Studies
Architectural Theory, History and Critical Studies, produces, develops and communicates knowledge in the field of architecture from a cultural-historical and socially critical perspective.
Experimental approaches to writing architecture and architectural research. Contributions to the international forefront since over twenty years by among others Katarina Bonnevier, Brady Burroughs, Catharina Gabrielsson, Katja Grillner, Hélène Frichot and Sepideh Karami.
Image: Katja Grillner
A strong research and education profile in feminist studies and gender theory in architecture. A development over the last fifteen years evolved and developed with longstanding engagement from among others Katarina Bonnevier, Brady Burroughs, Catharina Gabrielsson, Katja Grillner, Hélène Frichot, Meike Schalk and Malin Wennerholm.
Image: Katja Grillner
The volume Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University Pittsburgh Press, 2020) is edited by Kenny Cupers, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helena Mattsson and is a partial result from Mattsson and Gabrielsson’s VR-supported research project on architecture and deregulation.
From the police interventions against the tenants in Hässelby family hotel when in July 1979 they refused to leave the house's dining room. (From the forthcoming book Architecture and Retrenchment, Helena Mattsson)
Photo: Reportagebild
Witness seminar with the group Living in community, BiG, (founded in 1980) at ArkDes, 2019. The seminar focused on collective houses and was organized by Action Archive. On the picture from upper left: Ingela Blomberg, Gunilla Lundahl, Inga-Lisa Sangregorio, Sonja Vidén, Kerstin Kärnekull, Ann Norrby.
Foto: Mariette Parling
The double volume Architecture in Effect (Actar 2019) concluded the KTH-hosted strong research environment assembling researchers across Sweden and internationally approaching architecture and urbanism from critical studies, theory and history perspectives 2011-2017.
Image: Actar Press.
Investigating the construction and completion of Stockholm Public Library.
Photo 1929, courtesy of Stockholms stadsmuseum (CC).
Tectonics Revisited - Exploring Fabulation through the Irrational Tectonics of the China Central Television Headquarters of Koolhaas/OMA.
Photograph: Iwan Baan, 2012
Workers assembling the IMS structural systemon a construction site in New Belgrade, early 1960s. The image is part of the forthcoming edited publication project in preparation from the session “Flexibility and its Discontents: Techniques and Technologies in Twentieth Century Architectural Production” organized by Tijana Stevanović at the international conference EAHN 2021, The University of Edinburgh.
Reprinted from Arhitektura Urbanizam, 35-36 (1965)
Two neighborhood gardeners and a community organizer plant seeds in a garden bed in Rinkeby, a modernist suburb outside Stockholm that was designed during the so-called “Million Program,” when Sweden built one million dwelling units between 1965 and 1974.
Photo by Jennifer Mack, 2018.
Low-cost housing model presented to Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere in the context of the Nordic Tanganyika Project, c. 1963-64. How architectural expertise has been mobilized as a leverage tool for broader development through foreign aid-funded research and training programs is the topic of a symposium organized by Sebastiaan Loosen, Erik Sigge, and Helena Mattsson, 9-10 September 2021.
The research methods are interdisciplinary and relate to a broader field of humanities and artistic research practices, as well as to technology and social sciences. The theory and history of architecture and the built environment is studied as an historical process where contemporary conditions are contextualised as part of a longer development, and deepens the understanding of architecture as a spatial, aesthetic and social practice. In critical studies architecture is studied as profession, discipline and cultural expression, including effects of different ideological systems and power structures on architecture, as well as how architecture reproduces or counteracts such systems or structures in different contexts.
Staff in the research field Architectural Theory, History and Critical Studies
