Architectures of Governance
Studio Theme
Following over twenty-five years of market-driven development, this studio engages with sites of contemporary urban crisis — including slumlord-controlled housing, collapsed industrial economies, and ecological breakdown. Working within a Nordic context but drawing on international examples, we examine how architecture and the practice of architecture are shaped by regulatory frameworks such as detailed development plans, building codes and technical systems, and land-use policies — and confront their limits in addressing today’s urgent social, economic, and environmental conditions.
Students are invited to challenge existing systems, expose spatial injustices, and propose new models of governance through spatial intervention. The studio positions architecture as a critical and imaginative practice — one that can reshape the collective management of land, resources, and public life. Through speculative design and grounded analysis, we explore how architecture might act within — and against — structures of power.
The studio foregrounds architecture as a cultural, political, and spatial practice capable of rewriting the rules of the game. As such, a major component of the studio is to communicate the output of collective investigations through public forums and exhibitions, and to understand how architecturally produced evidence can be used within judicial systems. This approach can be summarised as forensic.
The studio collaborates with a range of external partners to anchor design within real-world governance contexts. Partners include Stockholm City, Hyresgästföreningen (the Swedish Union of Tenants), Färgfabriken Art Hall, as well as municipal agencies, civil society organisations, infrastructure authorities, architects, researchers, and tenants’ and business associations. These collaborations provide students with direct engagement with contemporary governance challenges, positioning design not simply as an outcome but as a mode of enquiry through which to investigate and reimagine how architecture, institutions, and urban space are negotiated, governed, and transformed over time. See more on the AoG Instagram account
Studio Method
This studio adopts a practice-based research approach, combining site-specific enquiry, speculative design, and critical reflection. Students engage with historical and contemporary forms of governance — from formal state planning and legal codes to informal, community-led systems of spatial organisation.
Teaching formats include tutorials, collective and individual fieldwork, collaborative seminars, and design workshops. Students conduct material inventories (tracing resources, infrastructures, land ownership, and building stock) and social inventories (mapping institutional actors, everyday practices, and regulatory conditions) as part of a wider toolkit that includes mapping, modelling, scenario-building, and spatial analysis.
The studio treats architecture as a media object, using photographs, video, models, drawings, and other practice-based methods to communicate beyond the architectural community and to foster public engagement. We draw heavily on the architect’s skill of examining, recording and representing the material reality of the world.
Method 01 – Architecture as Witness
Architecture is approached as a tool of observation, documentation, and critical enquiry. Through mapping, fieldwork, archival research, interviews, and spatial analysis, students identify key sites where questions of governance, ownership, regulation, and the built environment intersect. Buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures are treated as witnesses to broader political, social, and ecological transformations. The outcome is a series of critical reports that assemble architectural evidence through drawings, models, diagrams, photographs, and text.
Method 02 – Architecture in and after Suspension
Building on the findings of Method 01, students develop design proposals that explore new forms of repair, stewardship, governance, and public responsibility. Working across scales—from material interventions to territorial strategies—projects test alternative relationships between architecture, regulation, and civic life. The work culminates in a public dioramic room where drawings, models, films, documents, and spatial propositions are presented as architectural instruments for negotiation, recovery, and transformation.
Competencies
- Develop multi-modal analytical methodologies based on ethnographic, forensic and material methods.
- Develop exhibition and public event strategies and, through design and proposition, reflect on architecture’s role in shaping equitable and resilient futures
- Propose critical spatial and material interventions grounded in social, ecological, and political contexts
- Analyse spatial, legal, and regulatory frameworks shaping the built environment and work critically with planning documents, land use codes, and institutional policies as design material
- Develop architectural and urban strategies in response to complex governance challenges
- Explore alternative models of land stewardship, resource management, and spatial agency