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What are the main challenges that architectural researchers need to address in the near future? What approaches, knowledges, and skills thus need to be ensured and passed on through research education? From a backdrop of the pressing concerns that dominate the present moment — rapid tech-nological transformations, increasing socio-economic divides, vast concentrations of power, escalating levels of war and violence, and where the e#ects of climate change have become ubiquitous — these issues sat at the core of a two-day symposium, held at the School of Architecture KTH in December 2023.

Organised around three interwoven themes — topics and challenges; methods, skills, and knowledges; and the signi!cance of research for practice and society at large — the symposium gathered an international array of researchers, educators, scholars, and stakeholders in close-knitted round-table conversations. A common premise for these discussions was that architectural research today is a multi-modal, explorative, and heterogenous field — verging from critical historiography and the humanities to critical urban cartographies and digital fabrication — defined by cross-, inter-, and transdisciplinary exchange. The symposium made it clear that research education is not only about fostering academic skills, but encompasses a larger sphere of knowl-edges, tools, and practices related to the built en-vironment, as informed by a strong ethical agenda.

Discussions were held on the role of architectural research in shaping public discourse and policy, on expanding on the forms of dissemination, and on its potential to in"uence how societies respond to climate change, urbanization, and social inequities. In particular, there was a strong call for research that actively engages with marginalized commu-nities, recognizing their voices as essential to the creation of just and resilient built environments. The importance of fostering a research culture that is both rigorous and responsive to real-world challenges thus emerged as a central concern. Offering a critical space for dialogue and re"ection, the symposium was an initiative of the Swedish national school of research education in architecture ResArc (https://resarc.se). Drawing on its agenda and our collective experience of providing doctoral courses to PhD candidates for now over a decade, the symposium was integral to the process of assessing these years and in making preparations for those to come.

With this publication, Towards the Future of Research Education in Architecture, we wish to make some of the insights that emerged through the symposium more acces-sible to a larger group of stakeholders. Placing the emphasis on the voices and perspectives of those actively involved in research education — rather than on policies, charters, and other steering doc-uments — the contributors to this publication are all researchers and educators, situated at the four architectural schools in Sweden and in six other European countries. Forming part of the institu-tional network that ResArc has developed over the years, the international contributors provide an im-portant context for our assessment of the challeng-es and potentials of conducting research education in Sweden. To further that end, in this publication we are providing additional information as regards to the varying conditions of educating researchers as de!ned by national and institutional regulations. Special emphasis is placed on the funding of doctoral students in Sweden together with an account of ResArc’s history, which has not previously been documented.

Less a record of the symposium, and more a forward-looking guide as regards to the potential of research education, with this publication we are addressing all those who share our commitment in safeguarding and advancing research in architec-ture, and who recognize the signi!cance it holds for making, interpreting, and shaping the built and lived environment. While we do not claim to provide an overview of this !eld, nor a complete survey of the di#erent conditions for conducting PhD education across Europe, we are con!dent that the voices, perspectives, and facts compiled in this publication are su$cient to capture some crucial matters of concern. The issues raised in this book are not just theoretical; they have practical implications for how we train future researchers, for how research may inform policies and practices, and for how it can contribute to global conversations on sustain-ability, equity, and social justice. Therefore, this publication also serves as a call for action, for stake-holders both within and beyond academia, in order to ensure the stability and long-term continuity of architectural research in Sweden.

Catharina Gabrielsson, Gunnar Sandin & Isabelle Doucet. Colleagues in ResArc 

Fragments from Roemer van Toorn's contribution:

A

To perceive and experience what new op-portunities are possible in the current and future conjuncture — opting for a strategy based on global concern while acting locally — architectural research is of utmost relevance. It enables society to imagine how such a livable civil society could become a reality. After all, architecture remains one of the only spatial and visual expressions in everyday life, allowing us all to experience those projected other worlds and their distinct forms perspec-of organization and value, while simultaneously its architecture projections enable us to imagine another future that architecture’s particular tech-niques of realization allow.

B

Architects, more than any other educated group in society, must engage with both economics and biology, human collectives and geometry, history and matter, energy and desire, nature and arti!ce, technology and automation, care and pleasure, aes-thetics and politics. From this perspective, archi-tecture at its core can only be understood as rela-tional and interdependent, operating across many di#erent !elds. Consequently, its research must inherently be cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. 

Revolutionary Love. The architecture of Lina Bo Bardi

In this talk, Roemer van Toorn talks about Revolutionary Love as political concept. It is about an open encounter to enjoy life in all its complexity and possiblility—one based on love (a twoness) moving away from identity, allowing a society to make difference relate, between the human and more-than-human. It is about a love for the world (Amur Mundi) in its plurality. Its genuine passion is a shared construction.

“It is precisely its open character that is so moving,” remark Anne Dufourmantelle and Antonio Negri, “a feeling of strength, a need to create. In other words, a need for communality, sharing, cooperating. So the personal project is also a political project. It is not enough to want freedom, the point is to make freedom productive.”

How this political concept, also reemerging in colonial studies, can “redistribute the sensible” in architecture—building on the ideas of Jacques Ranciere—is one of the key questions this talk will explore by looking at the architecture of the Italian born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914 – 1992). How the human and more-than-human meet in her work – is outstanding, ahead of its time, and untill recently overlooked by many. It is here where my power of gentleness in Architecture, an aesthetics of hospitality, is also at play.

The lectur eis part of the DESSA lectures curated by Petra Ceferin Professor at the school of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana.

The lectures refers to some works of architecture (a book of arch. theory, set of buildings by an architects, unrealised projects, a single building, opus of an architect, etc.) that were done in the past (whenever) and that succeeded to articulate some good hypothesis, or ask a good question – and because they asked good questions, one should return to these works today; return in order to be able to continue from where they stopped, continue to develop architecture as a meaningful practice, a practice that (as you and I would have it) supports the processes of emancipation.

About the book:

This anthology presents work on cultures of assembly. It stresses the relevance of small-scale and decentralized spatial formats of local knowledge production to community building and embedded political decision-making in the context of the socio-ecological transition. It reinforces the role of both individual and collective action while proposing distributed assembly and proximity as core attributes in the production of the contemporary and future city. It calls for a revised form of spatial politics.

Miessen's ongoing research trajectory Cultures of Assembly was initially kicked off during a Harvard GSD fellowship in collaboration with Joseph Grima, in which the two architects investigated the sociopolitical dimension of (urban) spatial design. Observing the Kuwaiti cultural and social landscape with a specific interest in the politico-spatial phenomenon of Diwaniya, this distributed urban form of para-institutional assembly established a starting point for a long-term body of research.

Diwaniya can be understood and interpreted in multiple ways. Beyond a techno-futuristic idea of progress, it presents a showcase of an alternative that attempts to imagine a model of a (more) solidary city. On the scale of a city, and in fact small country, it interrogates how we—as a society—can learn from and produce alternative formats of physical exchange, working towards realistic scenarios of decentralized decision-making and spatial justice.

Agonistic Assemblies asks: how can spaces—both physical and virtual—be envisaged to create publics? How is collectivity and society being generated spatially and in terms of policy? How do we "practice" society as a bodily, spatial form, and how does this practice contribute to spatial justice? Are there specific spatial settings that can intensify these practices? What kind of spatial design can we imagine as platforms for change?

Central to this project is the reflecting on and rendering of the underlying driving forces of informal institution building at the interface of agonistic (urban) spatial politics—in a global political climate facing what Mark Fisher famously framed as "capitalist realism" in conjunction with the social-ecological transition while, arguably, also facing a crisis of imagination.

This project articulates a curatorial impetus towards urban policy making in conjunction with spatial proximity as a tool to mediate between the individual, the collective, the neighborhood, the city, state politics, and society at large. If we understand assembly as a form of spatial gathering, and the bonfire as the prehistoric space of assembly, what constitutes its contemporary equivalent?

Today we live in an increasingly violent world, a state of emergency, with many crises on many fronts. According to Roemer van Toorn, the power of gentleness gives us an opportunity to imagine what we miss most today: a caring and welcoming world. But be warned, gentleness is not about making something cute, what needs to be restored is its greatness, its ‘warrior’ greatness, because it is a force of resistance, even a weapon. And it is a principle of life, of lived experiences, shared and situated with liberative potential. As philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle has observed in her book The Power of Gentleness, any beginning is necessarily rooted in gentleness: the birth; the beginning of love (Dufourmantelle 2018). As Antonio Negri and Defourmantelle stated says Van Toorn, love is a genuine passion, a shared construction: ‘... it is precisely its open character that is so moving: a feeling of strength, a need to create (...), in other words, a need for communality, sharing, cooperating. In that sense the personal project (of love) is also a political project. It is not enough to want freedom: the point is to make freedom productive.’ (Negri and Dufourmantelle 2004). Fred Moten and Stefano Harney speak of something similar in their thought in All Incomplete, with reference to the ‘jus generativity’ (Moten and Harney 2021). Here gentleness concerns a quality and capacity to give, not in economic terms, as in the managing of scarcity, but as in generosity (as in the abundance of the rainforest). When being with nature, being with trees, for example, it is all about experiencing – not a scripted space to make you consume but all about the experiences of relationships-in-action, a kinship in relation to otherness situated where architecture can play a formative and emancipatory role. Gentleness here is not simply a delicate, pleasant contact, it is recognizing and accepting the other, the construction of the human and the non-human, in their fragility. To Dufourmantelle, and Van Toorn, gentleness is a way to relate to the world, it allows emotions and feelings, thought and experience, it is located upstream and affects the very principle of life as deployment. It is open ended. And, gentleness is more than taking care, gentleness is lavished and received with experiment and dolce vita. In other words, it has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constraints, how you can dance with enmeshment, move beyond limiting adversary, enact, imagine, and dare to create lives of sustained well-being and joy.

Through a listing of eight tableaux, with reference to contemporary architecture projects (a visual essay), and the philosophy of Dufourmantelle, an aesthetics of hospitality is outlined, as part of an atlas of hospitality the author is currently building.

This research comes from a particular place, a rather unique moment in the history of the Netherlands when Dutch architecture started to be much applauded for its radical approach and innovative design when the typhoon of another modernization swept across the globe. Architects, municipalities, investors, developers, companies, institutions, politicians, inhabitants, educators, researchers, critics and alike, were all thrown into a kind of experimental condition, one being both pragmatic and geographical. It has been a journey learning about the rise of another modernity and its architectural approaches; both in terms of mapping its condition, and through the experience of discrete designed objects within its larger urban and global landscape.

The constitutive role Dutch architecture played as aesthetic practice giving form to another modernization has been organized around two different political approaches in this PhD by publication. Chapter One entitled Fresh Conservatism critically addresses how the much- celebrated Dutch movement in architecture paved the way of an upcoming Neoliberal phase of capitalism. The problem for many was not to make political architecture, on the contrary, its innovative practices — without being too conscious about the political — turned out to affirm what was later called the post-political. With Aesthetics as a Form of Politics of Chapter Two, exemplary alternative horizons of possibility are being discerned within Dutch architecture; ones that make architecture politically through their aesthetic regime. It has everything to do with how freedom can be created with constrains, how you can dance with enmeshment, can move beyond limiting adversary, and ‘dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.’

Making architecture politically is about the creation of running room; a sense of polity — an aesthetic regime redistributing the sensible — that allows for a multiplication of connections and disconnections that reframe the relations between people, the world they live in, and the way they are supposed to act and behave. Such a field of possibility concerns a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of the common experienceof the human and non-human that change the cartography of the perceptible, the imaginative and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and emancipatory possibilities of collective and private enunciation. Instead of slipping into paternalism or control, the idea of such a radical openness is characterized by indeterminacy, nuance, incommensurability, hospitality, dissensus, joy and the multitude of encounters it could generate. It is about becomings that breaks open the conventional way space is experienced, thought and distributed, one that displaces the binary dialectics of colonizer and colonized, the one against the other by introducing a third (And) that belongs to both the one and the other while opening alternative horizons.

Making architecture politically will not be without consequences, it asks us to consider another path. Many of architecture’s properties, including its history of ideas, material legacy, form of content, and forms of expression are to be reconsidered. What must be taken in consideration is under what conditions, and with respect to what forces, architecture could become active and creative, rather than reactive or nihilistic, confronting the many crises of the world today. Such an architecture of polity is as much about ideas, as the discovery, and invention of new forms making architecture politically.

By grappling with making architecture politically, finding it wanting through critical analysis, observing the exemplary and often a-political role contemporary Dutch architecture played in the 90ties and onward, it turns out the problem is not to make political architecture — all archi- tecture is political — but how to make architecture politically.

The Power of Gentleness in Architecture. Towards an Aesthetics of Hospitality

The last decades the discourse of sustainability has expanded towardsother related approaches on the built environment in architecture theory and practice. These relational perspectives can be characterized by a move away from the architectural object itself towards a focus on the processes through which the architectural object is materialized, produced, con- structed, maintained, demolished, recycled, renovated, and experienced. Reconsidering architecture from these relational sustainable perspectives (of social - and ecological care), is of extreme and urgent importancegiven the multifaceted crisis of care today, but unfortunately the question of aesthetics has disappeared by reducing architecture to a by-product of processes, materials, and technologies. By neglecting the question of the aesthetics, it is underestimated how essential the visual, experiential, haptic and bodily engagement are for its users, architects and alike. The inevita- ble questions of affection, perception, beauty, joy and happiness need to be considered as intrinsically linked with sustainable issues for society and its different cultures as a whole.

With my new research “The power of Gentleness in Architecture. The Aesthetics of Hospitality,” I aim to document, explore, define, and theo- rize how a particular aesthetics of hospitality can emerge and be devel- oped towards a sustainable future of social and ecological care by looked at exemplary contemporary and historical architecture practices and the different lifeworld’s that are created under influence of migration. Such sustainable practices of architecture are effective through both their in- novate material and technical solutions as well as their aesthetic regime, enabling the configurating of new experiences that create new modes of sense perception while inducing novel forms of social and political sub- jectivity beneficial for both the individual, society as a whole. It is about an approach and aesthetics how you can dance with enmeshment within the constraints of a particular time, in other words can enable provisional freedom by means of an aesthetic regime.

In simple terms it comes down to an open architecture; one incorporating multiple voices, backgrounds, and ethnicities empowered through its sus- tainable aesthetic regime redistributing the sensible. It is about a research wishing to make a case for an architecture that accommodates and fosters diversity, liveliness, and unpredictability, in stark opposition to over-deter- mination, exclusion. Its gentleness is about a power that is also soft, a nobil- ity that is also humble, a sweetness that is also intelligent, a subtlety that is nevertheless striking. Gentleness is about a fragility and complexity that has the potential to subvert and change the status quo, a micro-politics of specu- lative construction towards an open, ecological, and socially just future.

Rather than confirm existing identities and conventions, we believe architecture can be most effective when it allows us to become some- thing else by imagining and fabricating alternative models of inter- action towards a better future. In that sense architecture is one of the most powerful creative disciplines of world-making available.

Without setting foot on site, due to covid 19, the master thesis students of 2020/21 have been able to do amazing and relevant work. They worked extremely hard, and with extra efforts. And, we should not forget the extra ordinary efforts of the studio tutors and the UMA staff; what they have made possible, creating the infrastructure and possibility to focus and do our work during covid 19. We also should not forget the many guests, reviewers, and what our new faculty members, who joined us in this complicated year, have been able to contribute. Truly impressive!

Education on online, working at home – we all experienced its disadvantages, anxiety, and limits, but it brought a whole new set of skills and opportunities as well, overcoming physical borders, allowing us to create and have transnational discourses and expertise input, to be more concentrated and informed while being at the kitchen table, bedroom, on the road, or in the garden. Furthermore, it brought less pollution due to no travelling and often a better balance between work and private life.We as examiners were inspired by how the students work became operational within the different studio’s research frameworks. We enjoyed their presentations, learned from their work and what is at stake in different conditions in the world, seemingly in the margin, out of sight, but in fact very much belonging to our global society as a whole.

The students showed that research is very much part of architecture. That research, collaborating and interdisciplinarity is needed to confront the fastness of our ignorance when we initiate a project. As UMA students they worked all over the world, confronted fantastic cultural and technical complexities and addressed many crises. The students have shown that architecture is as much about ideas as well as about construction, is about programming life, form, aesthetics, about humanity and critical care for the environment, creating sustainable and ethical spaces with the support of the own zone of competence we call architecture. Students learned that architecture is all about transforming abstractions into real spatial qualities, is about creating spatial milieus for its inhabitants and ecological environments in each condition and scale anew. Even in its most small contributions we observed – that their architecture is all about worldmaking, projecting a better future, different from what they have found when they started to investigate a site and its culture.

The different master theses were wide of scope, potential and relevantly contributing to an idea of architecture; thinking outside of the box, also very much outside the borders of academia, to have a positive and real impact in this world. What we observed, nurturing such tendencies at the Umeå School of Architecture from the beginning; is that there has been a huge change, what one might depict as societal awareness becoming apparent among architecture students. Students no longer ‘escape’ in Design, or a criticality without proposition. In that sense the students are part of a new generation – political aware, responsible; addressing the world and its many crises, empowering the one’s and who have no voice, or that which has no voice yet, but deserves and needs to be addressed, even though it can be difficult.

It is very unfortunate that Peter Kjaer, the founding dean of UMA, (giving UMA its name!), passed away last March. Peter understood as no other that architecture is more than an administrative or technical profession. Architecture for Peter is foremost and first an artistic, political, and cultural practice. “And that is good news!” observed Esperanza: ‘we won’t be replaced by robots and algorithms in the future, creativity counts! With Peter’s vision, great enthusiasm, and his heart for society and its people, he started to create a culture and place at UMA of many voices, a transnational culture of teachers, lecturers, students from all over the world, with projects in Umeå, Egypt and India moving away from ‘only’ a Western, colonial curriculum perspective.

We should not forget that thinking out of the box started with Peter, that his spirit is very much among us and alive. Peter Kjaer made the beginning of what we celebrate and share today at the Umeå School of Architecture, fostering inner development and growth of students, faculty, and staff, creating an inspiring, pleasant, and friendly work environment. Peter would be very proud of what UMA is today, how UMA as transnational community embedded in the North of Sweden, its teachers, researchers, students, management, staff, are full on, back on track, blossoming thanks to the open, engaging, and prosperous culture of professionalism, innovation, and experiment, with not to forget a devoted believe and enjoyment doing architecture.

We can’t wait to hear what the students take on next and we hope this publication edited and designed by Sara Zetterlund, Erik Persson, Sangram Shirke, Karina Gataulina, with the input of the tutors and students, provides a rewarding memory to what has been achieved. We hope external readers will find insight to the world that UMA is and inspiration from the wonderful work done by our students.

Roemer van Toorn, Examiner UMA 5 with Esperanza Campana (Examiner UMA 5) and Sofia Dona (Invited critic), Spring 2021

We are at the beginning of a new renaissance, a new modernity, of which we are far from sure what it will bring or could enlighten. As an institution, architecture has always directed our sensuous experiences and conceptual understandings of the worlds we live by and look out for. The power to create images is a good partial definition of architecture's competetence. In my opinion, architectural imagination - and that very much includes the image - can be a staging ground for action, enlightening indviduals and cultural movements. An enlightenment not as universal trugh, but as temporality, one of provisional possibilites and lines of flight. Instead of disqualifying the spectacle - as the classical left used to practice in the safe haven of academia - we should investigate how ethical spectacles could be created. To do so is not simple. A spectacular culture is most often designed to manipulate people and take their money, not to set the stage for democracy. But at the same time, we have to recognise that popular culture - its crafted fantasies and stimulated desires - speak to something deep and real within us. The challenge is what these ethical spectacles could consist of. This urgent question is by no means an easy one, but without a framework of understanding and alterantive theory, any means of instrumentality will be futile. 

In Year 1–3 of the Architecture Pro- gramme, courses in History, Urban Planning, Technology and Theory are closely integrated with the studio work. The supporting studies courses provide tools for the architectural project, expand the notion of Architecture and aims to encourage critical thinking.