Brannäs Wetland: Diffuse Life in the First Wastewater Wetland in Scandinavia

For the seminar, Navarrete Llopis presents a paper that will be published in a special issue of Planning Perspectives, edited by Janina Gosseye and Jennifer Mack, which brings together investigations into projects’ “afterlives,” or “what happens after the designer leaves a site.” To contribute to this topic, the paper traces the planning, design, construction, and inhabitation of the first constructed wastewater wetland in Scandinavia. Brannäs Wetland began operations in 1993, supplementing the Oxelösund sewage treatment plant with an additional outdoor biological step. Navarrete’s investigation unfolds around three questions relevant to the “afterlives” discussion. First, it considers the project’s open design strategy, which left several design decisions to the construction phase due to the limited detailed information about site conditions. Second, it examines the multispecies long-term form of engagement, in which clay soil, algae, butterflies, solar energy, wood hatches, sanitation workers, and visitors played crucial roles in the wetland’s architectural representations, performance, and transformations. Finally, the paper analyzes the frictions around the wetland’s maintenance over time, leading to the duplication of the system through the addition of a new indoor biological step. Following the idea of “diffuse design” (Escobar, 2018), where the different agents involved in a project throughout its life all exercise a form of design agency, Navarrete argues that Brannäs Wetland opens up a continuous “diffuse life.” This perspective challenges the clear demarcation and linear progression between a defined “before” and “after” in the project’s life.

The opponent for the seminar will be KTH Doctoral Candidate Malin Heyman

Bios 

Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, architect, researcher, and educator, is currently a lecturer and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory, and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. Her investigation Swedish Environmentalisms focuses on how alternative architectural responses to environmental concerns have been scaled up by Swedish municipalities, companies, and research councils (1970s-1990s). Navarrete Llopis’ work has been granted by the VR-Swedish Research Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation. She was co-curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 After Belonging, and is co-editor of the book After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (2016), which has received the FAD Thought and Criticism Award. She also has extensive experience in teaching seminars and design studios at Columbia University GSAPP, Pratt Institute, and ETSAM Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, among other academic institutions.

Malin Heyman is a PhD candidate, architect, teacher and writer within the Division of Architecture, Culture and Environment at KTH. She was educated at KTH and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, as well as the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, United States. She is currently project leader of the artistic research project “Unworlding the Anatomical Theater in Uppsala”, funded by the Swedish Research Council (project grant 2024-2027), and a second year PhD-student at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Together with James Hamilton, Malin is a founding partner of the collaborative practice AT–HH. The work of Malin Heyman and AT - HH has been exhibited at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design and the Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Young Swedish Architect prize by tidskriften Arkitektur in 2024. Malin has been lead architect on built projects nominated for Architects Sweden awards Kasper Salin and Villapriset. Her work as writer, editor and architect has been published in journals and books such as Rotunda (Trema förlag), A+U, tidskriften Arkitektur, Architectural Dissonances (L’Internationale), New Era Magazine, A.MAG and Arkitekturtidskriften KRITIK. The Editions QNDMC/GRAM monograph publication “Heyman Hamilton 05” on the work of AT - HH was published in the spring of 2025.