Forensic mapping of the river bend at Agnäsforsen, Bjurholm, layering topographic, hydrological and historical data across the site.
HYDROLOGICAL AGNECY: Navigating Industrial Ruins to Reclaim a Culture of Co-existence
Master’s Degree Project
2026
Öreälven in Västerbotten is one of Sweden's most protected rivers, and also one of its most domesticated. Over 150 years of timber rafting reconfigured its bed, banks and flow into a logistical corridor; when the industry left, hydropower inherited its infrastructure. This project reads the river as it is today, an industrial artefact behind a protected surface, and proposes a method that works with its current conditions to build a culture of co-existence rather than a return to a former state.
That inheritance did not stop at infrastructure. Protected status followed, yet the operational logic of control remained active beneath it: the bed still blasted, the banks still hardened, the flow still regulated into the corridor timber rafting once demanded. What reads today as wilderness is, in structure, a decommissioned machine.
This thesis investigates the gap between the river's legal status and its physical reality, and asks what architecture can do with it. Rather than treating restoration as a return to a prior natural state, the project reads the damaged landscape honestly, works with its scars, and creates the conditions for a culture of co-existence built on what the river is today.
The approach is multiscalar. A forensic mapping of the catchment draws together geological, biological, historical and hydrological data into a single spatial argument, leading to Agnäs in Bjurholm municipality, where 9,000 years of habitation, 150 years of industrial transformation, and an unresolved political present meet within the same bend of the river. Here, a promenade with three programme nodes takes the damaged landscape as its direct material.
Two design tools structure the proposal: the Research Catalogue of Inhibitors, which identifies where the industrial past still controls the ecological present, and Ecotectonics, which maps the substrate, flora and fauna that remain. Together they translate territorial reading into tectonic decisions.
The ambition is not to restore the river to a state that no longer exists, but to create the conditions for proximity, an architecture that acts as a mediator between human and nature presence, to bring the body close enough to understand what was lost and what the landscape still holds the conditions to become.
Comparative substrate mapping showing optimal spawning grounds before and after industrial intervention, with riprap and industrial deposits disrupting the riverbed gradient.
Axonometric site plan of the proposed promenade, tracing the boundary between forest, field and river across the three programme nodes.
Close-up views of the promenade's three programme nodes: the dam and fish passage, the dual-level structure through the inundation zone, and the recreational node at the historic bathing site, shown together with the full site plan.
Sections and views of the timber promenade structure at the water's edge, showing its varying relationship to visitors, vegetation and the riverbed below.
Physical model overlaid with a diagram of site processes, tracing water flow and socioecological relations through the structure.
