Research Groups

Architecture and Wood

The Architecture and Wood research group at UMA supports and promotes diverse architectural research into human engagements with forests, trees, and wood in the design and production of wood architecture and wood building products.

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Designing Cycles at 64° - Interior Landscapes and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus

Designing Cycles at 64° - Interior Landscapes and the Water-Energy-Food Nexus works towards turning buildings and their inhabitants from being consumers to becoming producers. The aim is to turn our ecological footprint into a positive one given the specific conditions of the subarctic climate zone with its very short growing season and extreme winters further impacted by the impacts and uncertainties of climate change.

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Designing the contemporary city

The research group Designing the contemporary city aims at investigating the current transformation of the city, observing the many changes related to current challenges. The group focus on defining methods for reading and intervening in the existing context, on reusing and reactivating abandoned areas and buildings. The specific competence of the group moves across disciplines: architecture and urban design, heritage, planning and evaluation, culture and art.

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Digital Materials

The group aims to reduce buildings carbon footprint with material innovation through computational workflows that allow the interplay of form, structure, and performance. The work takes three parallel threads for material-centered architectural design: The first investigates engineered smart materials for architectural applications, the second develops new ways of using traditional construction materials, and the third explores the use of waste as a resource for building systems.

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Infrastructures of Care: Architecture, Livable Lives and Just Environments

This group brings together researchers and teachers with an interest in social, cultural, political, and experiential dimensions of architecture and urbanism related to care and caring. The notion of care is understood as spaces – institutional, domestic, and public, and as ethics - caring for places, things, people and other species. Overall, our focus is on spatial translations of visions, norms and policies and architectural agency from an infrastructure of care approach.

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Making Architecture Politically

The research group investigates how architecture through its own zone of competences, can contribute to emancipation in our age of cosmopolitisation. It is about a spatial and aesthetic polity that has everything to do with how architecture can move beyond simple adversity, can contribute to lives of sustained optimal wellbeing, solidarity and joy through a radical openness of co-habitation, co-existence, intersectionality, multivocalty and inclusivity as core attributes of our future context.

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Swedish Housing Studies

The research group Swedish Housing Studies, located in Umeå, investigates housing architecture and domestic space as two sides of one single yet complex phenomenon, the Swedish home.

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