Architecture links and connects polities and their material spaces of inhabitation. The processes that shape and transform contemporary life are marked and inscribed directly into the forms and processes of material transformation of cities and landscapes, which act as very complex sensors. A new intensification is taking form in the Anthropocene, with vast areas of the Arctic and Subarctic being transformed into extractive regions for mineral resources and densely inhabited regions in southern Scandinavia governing them. The aim of this research design studio is twofold: to measure and characterise the material basis of these processes, and to design ways to augment the ability to respond to their intensifications.

The project revolves around the inquiry into the material characterisations of a millenary shift characterising contemporary life on our planet. A new intensification is reshaping the relations between the forms of cohabitation and the material structures and processes of the Earth.

The studio researches and develops methods of inquiry into the extent, scale and intensity of the energy and material flows that sustain contemporary human life. We consider these flows and their solidifications, encrustations, and severance as a process of construction over time and across space: as an architecture and as a landscape, shaping the forms of the interactions between polities and their material base. 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 region of Oslo, and 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 of these intensifications by asking a rather simple question: how heavy is a city? How heavy a landscape?

The complex answer to this simple question will help to understand new forms of territoriality emerging in the intensified grounds of the Anthropocene, with different rhythms and times of change, as well as different interests involved. The detailed readings and survey of the marks and traces that characterise the technosphere will reveal contested, asynchronous and divergent dynamics. These require architectural knowledge to guide an integrated transformation process.

A multiplicity of interests and territories: the shifts, delays, extinctions, decays and accelerations in the transformation processes of the contemporary technosphere are the structures that form the starting points for a series of strategic designs for new institutions to negotiate complex territorial, architectural and landscape transformations.