We start by asking a simple question: how heavy is a city? How heavy is a landscape?

These are simple questions which reveal a complex figure in the making, a new emerging system composed of human structures, and the social and technical networks, energy and material flux that sustain them. Architecture is considered in its geological connotations: as a mega trace-fossil of humanity with complex geometries and intricate processes of transformations, where local contemporary spatial changes interact with the deep-time processes of the Earth.

This project inquires into the material characterisations of a millenary shift characterising contemporary life on our planet. A new intensification is reshaping relations between the forms of cohabitation and the material structures and processes of the Earth—the Anthropocene.

Architecture links and connects polities and their material spaces of inhabitation. The processes shaping and transforming contemporary life are inscribed directly into forms and processes of material transformation of cities and landscapes, which act as very complex sensors. The project is to intercept these form-generating processes, to reveal them and to guide them: how to shape architectures amidst the multiple rhythms of change that mark contemporaneity?

We work on the spatial transformations in the Anthropocene: with vast areas of the Arctic and Subarctic being transformed into extractive regions for mineral resources, and the densely inhabited regions in southern Scandinavia governing them. The aim of the research design studio is twofold: to measure and characterise the material basis of these processes, and to design ways to augment capacity to respond to their intensifications.

The technosphere is analysed in its dynamic formations: a large and rapidly growing collection of complex objects resting atop and within a vast and growing layer of waste, only minimally recycled back to sustain human life. We focus on the technosphere of Scandinavia and its extractive industry and the metropolitan regions. We inquire into its physical transformations, linking the institutional structures of cohabitation, to the different dynamic processes of accumulation, sedimentation, transformation, assemblage, recycle, abandonment, innovation, decay and waste of the materials that form it.

We articulate new forms of representation and measurement, deploying remote sensing technologies, 3D lidar scans, multi-year Landsat analysis of these intensifications.

Professors in charge

John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog / Territorial Agency