Ulrika Knagenhielm-Karlsson

Ulrika Karlsson is professor in Architecture and head of the division Architecture, Technique and Theory at KTH School of Architecture, where she does research and teaches graduate design studio and seminars. She is also an architect and founding member of architectural research and design collaboratives Brrum and of servo stockholm. Karlsson's work engages with both architecture and artistic research, rooted in a strong commitment to sustainable methods that prioritize the preservation of existing structures. She views architecture as a cultural practice, where ecology and technology intersect to shape the rooms, we inhabit. In both her academic and professional practice, Karlsson maintains a critical and investigative focus to architectural representations. Her research explores how specific technologies simultaneously preserve and control, as well as construct and rewrite knowledge, in order to foster alternative ways of engaging with, capturing, making visible, and sensing that which already exists.

Karlsson has been a visiting professor at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, Tokyo University and professor at Konstfack in Stockholm as well as a visiting lecturer at the Bartlett, UCL in London and at UCLA, Los Angeles. She received her Architecture degree from Columbia University, New York, and Landscape Architecture degree from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

Karlsson has lectured and exhibited internationally and contributed to numerous journals including Arq, Perspecta, Via, Arkitektur and AD. She has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Centre Pompidou, ArkDes, SFMoMA, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, the Wexner Center for the Arts, MoMA/QNS, Artists Space, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. servo’s work is part of the permanent collections of SFMoMA and the FRAC Centre. She curated the exhibition Plots Prints Projections as part of a collateral event at the Biennale Architettura 2018, 16th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice.

In 2018 Karlsson received a 3-year artistic research grant for the project Interiors Matter: A Live Interior from the Swedish Research Council, together with Cecilia Lundbäck (KTH), Einar Rodhe (Konstfack), Daniel Norell (Chalmers) and Veronica Skeppe (KTH). Karlsson with her colleague Marcelyn Gow (servo los angeles) were recipients of a 2012 Grant to Individuals from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Karlsson was part of the Architecture In the Making Strong Research Environment in Architectural Theory and Method funded by Formas, and has earlier granted funding for the project Prototypes for Performative Design by the Swedish Research Council. KTH School of Architecture, through Ulrika Karlsson, was an academic partner of the research networkInnoChain - Building Innovation in the Extended Digital Chain, that received a grant from EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme under Horizon 2020.

A recent project by Brrum is ”Och eller inte” (And or not), a proposal for a public artwork Norra Stationsparken in Hagastaden, Stockholm, which was inaugurated in August 2024.