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The FATALE studio works with critical and feminist strategies in architecture and design, based on theories of gender, queer, post-colonialism and power relations. The studio engages in subversive and dialogical research and design practices applied to specific themes and/or locations. Link to studio program

During 2009/10 we will be located in Tensta where we are setting up our studio at Tensta Gymnasium. Lectures will also take place at Östermalmsgatan 26 (Wednesday and Thursday afternoons) and there will be workspace set up for temporary use of the FATALE studio participants here as well.

The local context in Tensta will be our site, both as a base for our studio as well as a project-site. Investigations and interventions with this specific location will reflect, question and affect each participant’s own experiences, assumptions and positions, while providing a connection to projects already in progress such as Vision Järva 2030, Tensta Arkitekturskola and other local happenings.

This studio will evolve in a rapid stream of production. The first four weeks will be intense like a crash course (also collaboration with the In space Master course at Konstfack). The program expands around ideas of fictional sites and fictive memories and we will enter into the domain of exaggerations - in your face- a kind of maximum- architecture whose main interest is to provoke sensibilities; using the notion of an Excitoir (with reference to Malin Zimm). Architecture will be explored as a concrete material practice always entangled with subject positions, relations of power and desire.

Feminist Design Tools is about getting hold of one’s own positions, how norms are embodied, how they play part in the creation of social spaces and how normativity is reproduced. But foremost, it is about suggesting, testing, critical acting in relation to norms, Queerying space, touching feeling, loving. We will produce - The productive look - The productive read - The productive act - The productive doc – furiously fast/ a lot / remarkably new.

We will not stay faithful to the sanctioned dichotomy of theory and practice, but constantly involve actors, their desires, their sensibilities and their actions in, or around the corners of architecture.

Participatory Mapping is a design research studio based on the critical design tools and methods developed in Feminist Design Tools. Its aim is twofold, first, to develop and test tools for spatial research such as methods for collecting site-specific knowledge through narrative methods that, as opposed to more analytical methods, require a participatory engagement with sites, contexts and actors. Second, to explore different modes of representation in relation to the mapping out of found processes, that may generate proposals that inspire a change of existing conditions.

The application of feminist and activist methods and tools unearths a specific knowledge of sites, which complements analytical and generalized instruments for the purpose of planning with personal, subjective, and narrative accounts. Through engaging in a closer dialogue with a site and its agents participatory and collective forms of acquiring and mapping information establish. This produces material, which is informative as well as it is fictional, which has the power of opening up for new site-specific themes and discourses. Urban proposals will be developed, which consider the intimate scale of 1:1 as well as larger conceptual frameworks.

Dialogical Interventions (Brady Burroughs)
Spring 2010 (Period 1)

Dialogical Interventions is a design research studio based on critical design tools and methods developed in the courses Feminist Design Tools and Participatory mapping. Students will develop architectural design projects in dialogue with a historical, physical and theoretical context, where a critical approach to power relations is used to synthesize, shift and transform the thought and practice within architecture and design. The principal aim of the course is to develop the students’ ability to work with architectural design supported by a combination of generative and explorative critical perspectives.

Relationships between space, bodies and places are the main focus. Through physical interventions themes such as diaspora, identity/subjectification, materiality and power in 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional works of various scales will be explored. The research conducted through the studio will use practice-based methods considering the architectural design projects to have a principal role in knowledge production.

Link to course syllabus/kursplan

Altering practices (Brady Burroughs and Meike Schalk)
Spring 2010 (Period 2)

Altering practices is a research studio based on critical design tools, methods, and projects developed in the courses Feminist Design Tools, Participatory mapping, and Dialogical Interventions. The principal aim of the course is to develop the student’s capacity to critically understand, evaluate, and contextualise the transformative potential of their own and others’ design projects and practices. The design process will engage further mapping and critical writing practices.

Taking the point of departure from proposed interventions, the students will work with methods for imagining their project’s specific transformative potential in an extended geographical and temporal perspective. Further they will be asked to articulate, through self-reflexive and dialogical methods, the practice developed over the course of the year in terms of an altering practice.

Link to course syllabus/kursplan

Research and methodology seminars (Katja Grillner)

The Critical Studies Design Studio is a place where we will engage in research and design, and we will do this in an integrated way. Architectural design projects produce knowledge and instigate change. In our projects we will frequently return to questions such as, what knowledge have we gained here and how will this project alter the conditions right here, who may benefit from this change, who might not? Research in our studio is pursued both as you build up your individual portfolio of projects and collectively as we test out and develop new critical design methods in collaboration.

A series of reseach and methodology seminars will support this aspect of the studio which includes during the autumn critical wrk with the 'diploma booklet'. oth 4th and 5th year students will work with the booklet as a tool to help clarify design and research questions, programs, methodologies and concepts.

Lecture program

Studio participants will follow the lecture program of the elective course Architecture and Gender: Introduction (AD236V). Link to lecture program 2009.

Study trips

Week 44 - Berlin - link to program

We will conduct a study trip to Berlin and visit the recent Baugruppen-projects, as well as examples of Quartiersmanagement, a form of participatory urban redevelopment of spaces of social conflict. We will also visit intercultural gardens to meet and discuss with some of the main actors pursuing urban and spatial practices in Berlin and elsewhere, which are inclusive and dialogical. Understanding the historical and political dynamics, which lead to different developments, will enable us to speculate on altering practices that instigate change.

In the Spring we will encourage study trips in smaller groups to visit current feminist architectural practices and research groups across Europe.