Northern Grounds
Studio Theme
With a focus on Shifting scale, Northern Grounds will continue its focus on architecture and its representations looking towards the North – the larger area in northern Scandinavia, also called Sapmi, of diverse cultures, ecologies, histories and agencies. With a modern and colonial history that has reshaped the grounds, these northern “critical zones” are again subject to infrastructural and climatic changes. The area holds a long tradition of reindeer herding and many strategic resources of raw materials (minerals, wood, oil and water) and infrastructure for their processing. The right to the use of land and water is a heated and greatly debated question. With a caring respect to situations, the studio will engage a series of sites of the north - natural, urban, rural, museal, fictive as well as places in the electronic weave. We will also continue exploring architectural methods for working with that which already exists – through modes of gleaning, reusing, recording, reassembling, conversations and architecturally making unexpected connections and proximities.
Studio Methodology
With a focus on research through making, the studio has an interest in the role of representation in architecture. This interest is inserted within contemporary approaches emphasising the entanglements of the physical with the virtual and their effects on how we imagine, understand, and make architecture. We encourage a curious, critical and experimental approach to technology and continually engage machinic processes in design work - such as LiDAR scanning, drone filming, photogrammetry, moving image, AI, 3d printing, CNC. Through collaborative and individual design investigations coupled with archival research, the studio aims to propose multiple ways of engaging with places, existing structures and material realities, specified through architectural questions. The studio includes workshops with invited guests and local established networks, recurring pin-ups, reading seminars and studio discussions to support students to contextualise their work and engage in contemporary architectural discourse.
Teachers: Sogol Baghban, Ulrika Karlsson