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Forms of Assembly

Studio Theme

This year, Forms of Assembly will engage with the social and material histories of Bergslagen, under the title HEAVYMETAL. The history of Bergslagen is closely linked to the extraction and processing of raw materials. Since the Bronze Age, mining has given rise to a landscape of dispersed communities and industrial sites across its loosely defined territory. Despite its peripheral location, the region has been shaped by fluctuations in global mineral demand, itself tied to prevailing systems of energy generation and material production. Today, the drive for green and digital transitions is once again drawing attention to the region's mineral resources. Yet its landscapes remain marked by industrial decline, depopulation, and environmental degradation.

At a time when calls both to halt and accelerate extraction coexist, HEAVYMETAL turns to Bergslagen as a site of ambivalence. Situated between decline and renewal, the studio explores how architectural strategies can engage with the social, material, and environmental legacies of its post-industrial landscape.

Balancing the hardcore modernism of "silo dreams" with calls for material and spatial reform, HEAVYMETAL adopts a critical and experimental attitude in search of alternative readings of the present. Referring to histories of mining and metallurgy, architectures of utility, and the subcultures that emerged from the "earthshaking blare and thresh of heavy machinery", HEAVYMETAL asks: What are the architectural and material imaginaries that define our present?

Studio Method

The studio believes in architecture’s ability to shape discourse and practice through form. Rather than making objectivity and rationality the sole driving forces, we value experimentation and "naïve" methodologies. By synthesising knowledge from a variety of fields into form-driven ideas and proposals, the studio seeks to go beyond established perspectives and generate alternative models of thinking.

Taking the current state of Bergslagen’s social and material conditions as our point of departure, projects will engage with universal architectural topics through situated readings, including material compositions, constructed landscapes, thermal comfort, weather fluctuations, infrastructures and social structures.

We encourage an investigative approach in which representation and process play a key role, with architectural and artistic research considered to be as important as the proposal itself. The studio works across a range of media, including images, drawings, models, films and text. Each semester will be compiled into a publication. As Beatriz Colomina reminds us, the manifesto is inseparable from its media: “The work didn't exist before its publication.”

Competencies

Critically analyze context through situated research and artistic means.

  • Deal with social and political challenges through conceptual, aesthetic, structural and spatial forms. 
  • Deal with material flows and histories through conceptual, aesthetic, structural and spatial forms. 
  • Learn by doing. Use the architect’s simple tools (plan, section, detail), physical modelling and experimental film- and image making to advance projects.
  • Develop design processes through idiosyncratic ideas and collective imaginaries.
  • Develop skills to present work as an entirety through publications and spatial installations.

Teachers: Carl Fransson, Niklas Lindelöw