Frida Rosenberg

Frida Rosenberg is an architect and teacher at KTH Architecture School. During the academic year 2020/2021 she teaches the housing studio 4M2H: Muddy and motley mass housing for millions of homes together with Erik Stenberg.  This year the studio will critically investigate the trajectory of co-housing, co-living, collective housing and further conceptual and typological understandings of living together in private and shared spaces of the dwelling. In addition, the studio will study the development of building mass housing in wood with the aim to map contemporary and future progression of industrialized building methods. She will continue to teach the History and Theory course in year three together with Jennifer Mack. The fall course focuses on the topic of New Towns. She is also teaching AI2808 Project Development and Architectural Concepts together with Susanna Hedborg Bengtsson at the Department of Real Estate and Construction Management.

Her current field of research focus on integrating historical research and practice...One venue of investigation is on the transfer of ideas in urban planning and housing in particular between Sweden and the United States in the 20th century. A fothcoming essay on this topic is "The Role of Design in the 1960s Swedish-American Landscape" in Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations edited by Dag Blanck och Adam Hjortén. In relation to the US election on November 3d, there will be analysis on the impact on architecture published here: www.stjarnspackat.se  

Her essays have appeared in Domus, PLAN and Footprint and with book chapters in Tio byggnader som definerade 1960-talet and in Producing Non-Simultaneity: Construction Sites as Places of Progressiveness and Continuity. She is the co-editor of Perspecta 40:Monster and Arkitektur och Modernitet. She previously taught at the School of Architecture, Lund University. Frida has worked in offices in Norway, US and Sweden on small scale residential projects as well as urban master planning projects. She holds a Bachelor of Science from University of Texas at Arlington, a Master of Architecture from Chalmers and a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University. Doctoral thesis:

The Construction of Construction: The Wenner-Gren Center and the possibility of steel building in postwar Sweden

The Wenner-Gren Center in Stockholm, built between 1954 and 1966, consists of three buildings dedicated to interdisciplinary and scientific research, designed by Sune Lindström and Alf Bydén of Vattenbyggnadsbyrån (VBB). The project was sponsored by Axel Wenner-Gren, and received support from the Swedish state through the donation of a property at the northern end of Stockholm’s thoroughfare Sveavägen. This thesis considers how the construction of the Wenner Gren Center played into a complex web of infrastructural alliances that both shaped and were shaped by the development of a new building format. It studies how the technical, social and economic processes in play during the project constituted a purposeful attempt to research a wider landscape of possibility in construction.

Pivotal to my investigation is the fact that steel was re-introduced as a structural building material in Sweden during the construction of the Wenner-Gren Center, which fundamentally affected that process. The thesis asks “what made steel building possible at the Wenner-Gren Center” It becomes evident that the answers to this question are multivalent. The thesis allows the particularities of different knowledge-practices combined into the architecture project to speak by mapping the debates between the actors involved: architects, engineers, various construction consultants and the investors and politicians behind the project. The thesis also implicates operational formats such as research test results regarding technical development, financial calculations, and pre-construction analyses in order to visualize how architecture is regulated. In other words, my investigation examines various agencies in the architectural process in order to unfold the significance of a single case study.

The thesis consists of a prologue, five chapters and a conclusion, a Swedish summary and a bibliography backed by more than 150 illustrations, many of them never published before.