The Fallacy of Architectural Speculation: speculating on the existing. Cornelia Kalle, Thesis Project 2025
Radical Domesticities – Housing Goes North
Domestic space in Sweden has long been imagined through the lens of the southern welfare project, producing a normative canon of home that casts the North as peripheral. Yet northern Sweden tells a different story. Here, domesticity has been entangled with vernacular practices forged in harsh climates, farmsteads that sustained mixed livelihoods, and mining towns or forested landscapes where collective forms of life were tested. Despite this richness, the North has rarely authored the imagery of its own domestic kitchens and living rooms. What does this absence reveal about the place of the North within the construction of Sweden? And what architectures of home emerge when the North speaks for itself? In response, the studio takes northern Swedish domesticity as both critique and speculation. Students will trace architectures that resist and adapt to state-driven standards, resource extraction, and cultural assimilation, while exploring how housing can engage vernacular logics, local resources, and more-than-human ecologies. The aim is to unpack the spatial, material, and cultural scaffolding of domestic life in the North and to propose new forms of dwelling rooted in northern realities yet able to inform housing futures elsewhere.
Context of Investigation
At the northern edge of Sweden, under the statistical demarcation SE33 Övre Norrland, housing and domestic life unfold across vast landscapes, extreme climates, and rapid transformations. Coastal growth contrasts with inland decline; Sámi and Meänkieli traditions intersect with new industries of the green transition; the state-driven denominations of Västerbotten and Norrbotten overwrite older indigenous geographies; and the old myths of the land of the future resurface as Det nya framtidslandet. Dwelling here is never, and has never been, neutral: it is shaped by migration, racialized histories, climate resilience, and contested ideas of the future. The studio takes this terrain as a spatial laboratory to probe architecture’s role in reimagining domestic space, asking how design can negotiate heritage and change, intimacy and collectivity, at the shifting frontier of the North.
Studio Agenda and Methodology
Radical Domesticities is a research-based design studio that investigates housing architecture and domestic space as two interwoven dimensions of the Swedish home. The studio addresses the urgent challenges of housing in northern Sweden by asking why, how, by, and for whom dwellings are built. Students will explore the spatial, tectonic, and social conditions of housing projects while speculating on their design, construction, and representation. The methodology is structured through a series of architectural experiments, each probing domestic space at different scales. Stretching the design inquiry from room to territory, students will test how encounters between everyday life and territorial dynamics can generate new architectural imaginaries of dwelling, both anchored in and transformative of the northern condition.
Teaching team: Daniel Movilla Vega (studio responsible), Mette Harder, Robin Durand, Pia Palo. Guest teachers: Lluis J. Liñán, Esperanza Campaña Barquero.
Latest update: 2025-09-02