Ulrika Knagenhielm-Karlsson

Ulrika Karlsson is an architect and founding member of architectural research and design collaborative Brrum and of servo stockholm. She is a professor in architecture at KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, with a focus on digital methods and tools, where she does research and teaches graduate design studio and seminars, and where she previously served as the Director of the Architecture program. Karlsson has been a professor at Konstfack – University of Arts, Craft and Design, Stockholm, and a visiting faculty at Bartlett, UCL, London. Karlsson has also taught at UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design. 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 colleagues in Brrum and Norell/Rodhe. 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 was earlier granted funding for the project Prototypes for Performative Design by the Swedish Research Council. KTH School of Architecture, through Ulrika Karlsson, is an academic partner of the research network InnoChain - Building Innovation in the Extended Digital Chain, that received a grant from EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme under Horizon 2020.

Engaging a playful use of technology and material experimentation, her practice has a specific interest in the role of architectural representations and their translations, where we sometimes encounter the conflation of material and information. A current project by Brrum is ”Och eller inte” (And or not), a proposal for a public artwork for the planned new park, Norrastationsparken in Hagastaden, Stockholm, which is planned to be completed 2021.