Roemer van Toorn

Roemer van Toorn is professor of Architectural Theory at the School of Architecture, Umeå University.

Dr. Ir. Roemer van Toorn’s research and education is broadly interdisciplinary, with architecture, urbanism, landscape architecture, at its core. As architect, and as expert in architectural theory and history he has a particular interest in architecture’s relation with emancipation, polity, migration, ecology, civil imagination, the environment, technology and its aesthetic regime. In other words, how architecture as cultural endeavor, through its own zone of competence can contribute to a fullfilling, enriching and liberative life for both the human and non-human; dares to create lives of sustained optimal well-being (justice) and joy for all, is the driving force of his own research.

His current research is about a becoming, an architecture of hospitality, one that breaks open the conventional way space is thought and used, one that displaces the binary dialectics of colonizer and colonized, the human against the non-human, the one against the other by introducing a third that belongs to both the one and the other, opening potential alternative and enjoyable horizons. Such a place of radical openness is about a margin; a profound edge, what has been called a “Thirdspace” where forms of emancipation can potentailly blossom. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary according to Van Toorn. Such a site of radical possibility, concerns a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of the common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective and individual enunciation. Instead of slipping into paternalism or control, the idea of such a radical openness is characterized by indeterminacy, nuance, openness, and the multitude of encounters it could generate. It is concerned with a cosmopolitical outlook, one that reimagines civilisation anew, welcoming co-existence, otherness, nature, the city and the countryside.

In 2023 he started a new research entitled “The Power of Gentleness in Architecture. The Aesthetics of Hospitality,” which received initial funding from the UmArts reserach centre at Umeå University. https://www.umarts.se/visionary_projects/the-power-of-gentleness/. In 2022 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for his PhD thesis “Making Architecture Politically. From Fresh Conservatism to Aesthetics as a Form of Politics,” from the Estonian Academy of the Arts, Tallinn. https://www.artun.ee/en/roemer-van-toorn-defended/. In 2019 two research volumes, funded by the Swedish Research fund Formas, published by Actar Publishers (New York, Barcelona) were co-edited by Van Toorn on ”Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects,” and ”After Effects Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research.” In the same year Van Toorn wrote and co-edited with Sangram Shirke "Celebrating Diversity, Radical Swedes. Towards a Cosmo-political Outlook." 

Together with rector Peter Kjaer, and professors Thomas Oloffson, Per Nilsson, Oren Lieberman, and Jüri Soolep he co-initiated and did run together with the scientific committee the PhD Research school at the newly established school of architecture at Umeå University with PhD students Sepedih Karami, Hannes Frykholm, Katja Hogenboom and Janek Ozmin. Furthermore he initiated and did run, among other programs, the public lecture series and roundtable conversations at UMA entitled "Relational Architecture," "Making Architecture Politically," and "Staging the Message." Together with the Swedish Research School in Architecture (ResArc) he organized the PhD Communication course for PhD students in Sweden "Staging the Message. The Architecture of Communication," https://communicationsresarc.net/.

Van Toorn is trained as an architect, and engineer at the TU Delft, The Netherlands. He was head of the history and theory program and of publications of the Berlage Institute, Postgraduate Laboratory of Architecture, Amsterdam, and co-founded the Berlage Institute PhD research school with the Delft School of Design (DSD) at the TU Delft, The Netherlands. Van Toorn taught at the Universität der Künste Berlin, St Lucas Brussels, and Ghent, while at the same time pursuing a career as an international lecturer, researcher, writer, curator, photographer, and regularly serving as an examiner and critic of architecture and urban design internationally.
 
His work as researcher, writer, curator and photographer has been widely published internationaly, while his photographic work has been exhibited in London, (Great Britain), Orleans (France), Winnepeg (Canada), Amsterdam, Rotterdam (Netherlands), and Los Angeles (USA).