Swedish Environmentalisms

This PhD dissertation investigates how Swedish public agencies, companies, and municipalities have scaled up alternative architectural responses to environmental concerns from the 1970s to the 1990s. I aim to study how this institutionalization has transformed both the architectural experiments as well as the organizations implementing them. To contextualize these transfer processes (from alternative responses to institutional endeavors), this investigation traces three aspects that shape the environmental practices in Sweden during the period of study. On the one hand, it follows the decentralization of responsibility, moving from public agencies, infrastructures, and governments to include both private companies and industries, as well as individual citizens. On the other hand, it also accounts for the two-fold condition brought about by the dissemination of the notion of “sustainable development” (as defined by the 1987 Brundtland report and the 1992 Earth Summit): the institutionalization of environmental practices and the indivisible association of environmental concerns with economic development. Within this context, this thesis asks: How have Swedish research councils, private organizations, and governmental bodies scaled up alternative architectures to materialize their visions of a sustainable nation and a “green welfare state”?

The scaling-up processes in focus here operate at three design scales that follow the cycle of human life: on energy production providing the resources needed for construction and life, on an ecological community centering on the spaces of inhabitation, and on sewage infrastructures treating the byproducts humans generate. First, this thesis studies a solar energy experiment funded by the National Council for Building Research (BFR). The project was part of a BFR’s funding campaign advancing alternative forms of energy production from 1979 to 1984 under the directorship of Ingrid Munro, the first woman directing the public agency. Secondly, I focus on how the process, design, and ideas produced around the first ecological community in Stockholm (built from 1989 to 1995) were adopted by HSB—the largest Swedish housing cooperative association. I trace the role of Mia Torpe (the ecological community’s main initiator) as she became the first environmental manager of HSB to design their campaign “Green HSB.” The third case study investigates how the infrastructures and habitats of wetlands, as a biological process encountered in nature, were transferred to support the industrial sewage treatment plant in Oxelösund in 1993. The Brannäs Wetland is considered the first constructed wetland in Scandinavia to complement a treatment plant with an outdoor biological step. Through the analysis of these three processes, the thesis aims to offer a critical theory on scalability, questioning and proposing an alternative to the simplification, homogenization, stability, and alienation of previous scaling-up models.

For a copy of the manuscript, please contact Alejandra Navarrete Llopis at alejnl@kth.se

Bio
Alejandra Navarrete Llopis is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator based in Stockholm, where she is currently a lecturer and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory, and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. Her research and curatorial work has been granted by the VR-Swedish Research Council, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Graham Foundation. Together with the After Belonging Agency, she was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 and editor of the book After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces and Territories of the Ways We Stay in Transit (Zurich, 2016), which has received the FAD Thought and Criticism Award. She also has extensive experience in teaching seminars and design studios at KTH, Columbia University GSAPP, Pratt Institute, and ETSAM Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, among other academic institutions.

Opponent
Ingrid Halland is an architecture historian and art critic. She is associate professor in aesthetics and culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. She also holds the position as associate professor II in art history at the University of Bergen. From 2020 – 2024 she held the position as associate professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design where she taught and supervised at the PhD programme.

Halland is the Principal Investigator of the research project «How Norway Made the World Whiter» funded by The Research Council of Norway, and Co-Principal Investigator of the research project «The Materiality of White», funded by Norwegian Artistic Research Programme. Together with Kjetil Fallan, she is Principal Investigator of the project 'Material Ecologies of Design,' which has received the CAS Research Grant 2025 - 2026, at the Centre for Advanced Study (CAS), the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

Halland is founder and editor-in-chief of Metode, a publishing platform by ROM for kunst og arkitektur. Her academic work is published in journals such as Architectural Histories, Aggregate, Log, Journal of Design History, INSERT, Arkitektur, Kunst og kultur, and The Journal of Nordic Museology. 

The book Deep White: Unsettling White in Western Art History and Aesthetics (under contract with Brill) will be published in 2025.