Studio 11: Radical Domesticities – Housing from the Swedish North
Northern Sweden has built homes for centuries, yet this knowledge of dwelling has rarely been brought together as a coherent body of architectural knowledge. The Sámi goahti, the Västerbotten parstuga, the tornedalsgård, LKAB arbetarbostäder, the Norrbotten arbetsstuga, the folkhem-era smalhus, the Million Programme lamellhus, the catalogue-built detached house, or the industrialised modular timber apartment block, each domestic type embodies decisions about the hearth, the relationship between dwelling and work, ways of living with cold, darkness and seasonality, and the organisation of household economies. Each translates its economic base (grazing land, forests, ore, hydropower, philanthropy, public credit, renewable energy, and critical minerals) into relations between land, labour, construction, and cost. This architectural intelligence survives in inhabited houses, memories, open-air museums, archives, regulations, standard plans, and elsewhere, but seldom enters the architectural literature or imagination shaping housing today. Hence, we ask: What does the Swedish North already know about dwelling? The studio addresses this question in two moves: first, by investigating how earlier northern economies shaped domestic space and settlement; and second, by developing the domestic architectures that the North’s emerging economies could produce.
Context of Investigation
The studio works across northern Norrland, a territory covering more than a third of Sweden’s land, home to a small share of its population and the focus of a large share of national expectations. The current industrial transition concentrates investment and housing demand in certain cities and towns, while inland municipalities lose residents and retain buildings they can neither fill nor demolish. Sápmi and the Meänkieli-speaking Torne Valley cross administrative boundaries; remote work blurs the distinction between first and second homes; and climate, distance, construction capacity, and cost constrain what can be built. The studio reads these conditions case by case and municipality by municipality, situating them within regional and national frameworks and wider European efforts to reconcile affordability, sustainability, and architectural quality.
Studio Agenda and Methodology
Radical Domesticities is a research-based design studio in housing and domestic architecture, structured through experiments that move from territory to cluster, from cluster to room, and from room back to territory. Through fieldwork in northern Sweden, students document and redraw cases, use 1:1 samples and physical models to test questions of space, construction, and material, and develop alternative proposals. These investigations accumulate into an Atlas of Good Housing: a shared body of spatial, material, environmental, and economic knowledge that becomes a resource for design. UMA4 develops a project through a sequence of structured experiments, while UMA5 pursues an independent thesis within the studio’s shared field of investigation.
Teaching team: Daniel Movilla Vega (studio responsible), Maria Luna Nobile, Robin Durand.
Latest update: 2026-08-30