A new architectural office is born

I have a new firm along with my best homie! Let's make magic

The dynamic duo from the gotland branch of skälsö arkitekter is now transformed into ateljé ö. In february 2019 a new era begins.

In the atelier we regard architecture as one of the fine arts and we work as artists of architecture. We believe that buildings can reconnect man with nature and bring happiness, calm and inspiration. For many years we have been working with the gotlandic nature as a generator of strong architecture and we love the context based work, whether small or big, on the island, the mainland or abroad.

Like the architects of old times we take pride in our profession and strive to take a hierarchically strong roll in the process of building. We are specialized in taking architectural projects from first idea to delivering the key to the client. Together with builders and craftsmen we create surroundings for life, beautiful and practical internally and externally.

We have been awarded with Villapriset (sweden's best villa) by Sveriges Arkitekter in 2017, ung svensk arkitektur (sweden's most promising young architects) by tidskriften Arkitektur 2017, Residence stora formpris (architects of the year) by Residence magazine 2017. And we did the worlds most prestigious architecture exhibition at la biennale di venezia curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley Mcnamara 2018. All under the name of Skälsö Arkitekter.

Joel has professional experience as a partner at Skälsö Arkitekter in Visby and previous employment at AQ arkitekter in Visby. Mats has professional experience from Skälsö Arkitekter in Visby, Abelardo Gonzalez arkitektbyrå in Malmö, Chroma arkitekter in Malmö and an architecture studio under own name in Malmö. We have professional academical connections from teaching and lecturing at Lund school of architecture (LTH) and SLU alnarp. Both Joel and Mats have degrees from Lund school of architecture (LTH) and the Royal Danish Academy of fine arts school of architecture (KADK) in Copenhagen. Joel also has a degree in building conservation from Uppsala university - campus Gotland. You can see some of our previous work by looking at Skälsö Arkitekters website www.skalso.se

Event in Copenhagen on Wednesday

Manthey Kula

An amazing project by the Norwegian practice Manthey Kula.
I had the honors to spend a few days together with Beate Hølmebakk (one of the founders of MK) a few years ago, while setting up Lund Architecture Symposium. I'm very fascinated and inspired by their work. Hope to see alot more in the future.
Here is a link to her lecture that I co-arranged for Lund School of Architecture: https://vimeo.com/78862713
 

Dymaxion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dymaxion House as installed inHenry Ford Museum

The word Dymaxion is a term that Buckminster Fuller used for several of his inventions. It is a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension.^[1]

A brand name was needed for the display of Fuller's first architectural model, later to be known as the Dymaxion house, at the Marshall Field'sdepartment store in Chicago.

In order to invent a word, a wordsmith hired by Marshall Field's spent two days listening to Fuller and trying to get a feel for the type of language he used. He then played with syllables from typical Fuller words, until he and Fuller agreed on the word "Dymaxion".

Fuller was excited about the word and used it for many of his inventions during the decades to follow, including the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion Deployment Unit, the Dymaxion car, and the Dymaxion World Map. Dymaxion also came to describe a polyphasic sleep schedule he followed, consisting of four 30 minute naps throughout the day. He also renamed his elaborate journal, in which he sought to document his life as an experiment with the greatest possible detail, as the Dymaxion Chronofile.

Anatomy sections

I was cut open a few weeks ago to remove a troublesome organ.
Inspiring to take a peek into the body and trying to get a grip of my own anatomy. Think my lost buddy is shown somewhere between 0.18 and 0.20, but I'm not sure...

Lego Technics Plotter

I wanted this so much when I was 10 or something like that. Remember that it was assembled in "the cool" toy store, Lekhuset, in Norrköping. It was so awesome and it could do such sweet orthogonal plot-outs

How I see my thesis work two years later

I got a mail today from a architecture student in Aukland. She asked me about my thesis project since she was interested in doin a project on the same topic. 

I started thinking and was brought back to the process of producing that project. I bet you all know that feeling of -"If I only would have..." haha. Anyway here is my reply, think it can be useful for architecture students dealing with consept and projects not directly related to buildning. Therefor I'm posting my mail here as well.

Hi

I'm flattered by your mail. Thank you for your kind words. 

My written report is in Swedish only, so I don't think you'll get that much out of it. 

Since this is a topic I'm really interested in I'm going to try to summarize some thoughts for you (as well as for myself).  Now, two years after finishing my thesis project I see my project in a bit of a new perspective. Therefore summarizing it now is a lot different from how I would have summarized it two years ago. Here it goes anyway:

-I wish that I would have had a clearer trajectory, both towards myself and towards teachers and co-students. Unfortunately I got caught in between architecture as building/structure and architecture as narrative/polemics. Unfortunately I did not do any of the two with full power; rather I did both with hesitation. This mistake happened both because of me listening to too many teachers subjective opinions, and that I didn't have enough trust in my own ideas. 

That said I would like to encourage you to specify what your interest in the topic is (In this case food and food production). 

-Is it the production, such as growing plants, slaughtering and fishing? 

-Is it taking care of leftovers?

-Is it the preparation, such as a kitchen/restaurant etc.? 

-Is it exposing what is hidden in the massive distribution chains before the food land on our plate?

-Is it the consumption of food, such as the shopping and/or the eating?

-Is it the cultural aspect?

...or is it something else?

Whichever you choose to focus on, your project has the possibility to become great (or shit). You just need to stick to what you believe in. If I only would have trusted my own idea more... 

My scheme built on exposing food production. I wanted to do this in as raw a way as possible, without the nice wrapping the grocery stores offer. After reading up on the systems beneath the production chains, my interest fell on a closed loop system to also show what is happening with the waste and how waste is useful to create the next batch of food (manure, energy etc.). I sketched up a diagrammatic system where food traveled through four machines, one for meat, one for fish, one for veggies and one for recycling (i.e. biogas). But then I got scared and turned these machines in to sculptures within a cook school, because you need to have a building to put the stuff into, right??? Because building=architecture! ...right??? OOOOH NO!!! There everything went wrong... Because you don't need to have a building to create architecture! Architecture can be what you want it to be. It could definitely be the four machines that you could interact with. Maybe I should do that project :)

So remember: Architects can be artists. Architects can be poets. Architects can do movies. Architects can build fantastic machines. And of course architects can do buildings and landscapes (but we don't have to).

However you do your project be prepared to be faced and criticized by traditionally bound teachers and colleagues if you don't go the ordinary way. But maybe it's worth it. I got a really hard critique when presenting my project both because what I've told you now (regarding the weakness in trajectory) and also because they thought it was a bit strange to approach an architectural project by exposing the "ugliness" of food production through a type of activism, instead of doing proper disposition of rooms and focusing on light and sight lines.

Hope this somewhat answered your question without being able to provide you with my thesis report.

Please contact me again if you think of anything regarding this topic or other stuff as well for that matter.

All the best 

somewhere around here I'd say the project was at it's best

micro cathedrals

via

codex seraphinianus

via

"in the late 70s italian architect, illustrator and industrial designer luigi serafini made a book, an encyclopedia of unknown, parallel world. it’s about 360-380 pages. it is written in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet. it took him 30 month to complete that masterpiece that many might call “the strangest book on earth”. codex seraphinianus is divided to 11 chapters and two parts - first one is about nature and the second one is about people.

btw five hundred years ago there was another book somewhat like that - voynich manuscript."

Copy/pasted thoughts from the late Lebbeus Woods. I miss your reflections on architecture and life

Once upon a time, before computers came to be the pre-eminent architectural design tool, architects made drawings by hand. Instead of leaving it up to the computer’s software to make and assemble the lines defining contours and edges of forms, architects would draw line by line, gradually building up the drawing. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, perhaps, the Italian term disegno, which means both ‘drawing’ and ‘design,’ worked to convince them that the two concepts were synonymous: to draw was to design, and to design was to draw. In the same way, the ideas of ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’ came together in the act, and the artifact, of drawing. To build up a drawing line by line is an analytical act—-one chooses exactly where to place the line, based on an understanding of the problem or conditions to be addressed, and, at the same time, of the need for the sum of lines to create a greater whole, a coherent, cohering and integrated form….

Once upon a time, long before notions of ‘green’ and ‘sustainability’ became fashionable, some architects were interested in the question of how to integrate architecture and nature. Their approach was formally architectural, rather than dependent upon technological devices, such as solar panels and geothermal wells. They reasoned that the forms of architecture, very much like the forms of the natural world, embody not only morphological principles of shape and its elaboration, but also those of the origins and meanings of things. Forms could speak the truth. Their approach was to study the forms of a site and of the spaces they wished to create, to collide them, to meld them, and enable new forms that would emerge….

Once upon a time, long before the invention of 3-D computer modeling, architects believed that architecture could best be described by orthographic projection—through plan, section, and elevation. While they would make, for their clients, the occasional perspective drawing, sometimes rendered in tone and color, with human figures for scale, cars and leafy green trees for realistic effect, they actually worked out their thoughts and designs through the rigorous coordination of two-dimensional projections. This amounted to a philosophical approach, because it channeled emotions, even those of great passion, into a game with precise, mathematical rules. This was not a game for amateurs, or casual wannabes, but only for those serious enough to master the rules, that is, to employ their great potential for expressiveness with exactness and economy….

There are many ways to begin the story of Chris Macdonald and Peter Salter, two architects from London who, in the 1980s, collaborated as Macdonald+Salter on a number of innovative projects, which were exhibited at the Storefront for Art and Architecture, in New York, in December of 1987. (The project shown here is the ICI Trade Pavilion, at the Royal Agricultural Showground, Stoneleigh, England, 1983). Their projects were never built, though were clearly intended to be, and their collaboration ended many years ago. All that remains are their drawings, or the inferior reproductions of them in a few yellowing exhibition catalogs. Even so, the ideas they embody live on, as does the spirit of their architecture.

LW 

Link up time

Tomorrow I'm gonna see my old buddy Oliver.

He is an amazing draftsman and a dear friend.

See more of his drawings here

Bathtub renovation

Just made a new frame for an old bathtub.
Had to do an exploded axo for it as well. A bathtub is like a small house... right!?

see photos and all that on my web

Europan - Let's play the waiting game

Handed in my very first Europan-competition entry the other day. Me and my two co-pilots on team- the very best, Peter and Sebastian made a quite fabulous project, that I will tell you more about in half a year (!). The winners will be announced December 13 2013
They say patience is a virtue....

Vernissage tomorrow

May 28 at 6pm, Lund School of Architecture will open this year's spring exhibition. I've had the honors to curate the exhibition and it's going to be fantastic to see everything up and shining tomorrow evening.

All creative studios are exhibiting their works, with drawings, images, models and projections, from first year to diploma projects,

All are welcome! 

ps. bring your own drinks

website launched

I thought it was about time to go pro.
Check me out at www.matserik.com

Very Large Structure - Manuel Dominguez

Make sure to check out the .ppt with the massive research on the project 

via: Pruned

Lund Architecture Symposium finally online

at last I have managed to upload the recordings from Lund Architecture Symposium. I took me three months of crawling through University bureaucracy, but finally...

Hope you enjoy, and keep your eyes open for a sneaky fellow snooping around in most of the videos. He happens to be me


Peter Cook Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Neil Spiller Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Simon Herron Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Léopold Lambert Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Hermann Klöckner Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Jorge Ayala Lecture at Lund Architecture Symposium 2012 from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

Symposium discussion from Lund School of Architecture on Vimeo.

RIP Lebbeus Woods

Professor Woods past away this morning...

His memory will live on through his great writings and drawings. A great inspiration for many of us. Rest in peace

via: LebbeusWoods Wordpress

Archfilm Lund

International Architecture Film Festival in Lund, Sweden, ArchFilmLund 2012, October 5-12th

For the program see: www.archfilmlund.se

LAS*12, T minus 7

If I haven't told you before I'm currently working as a project manager for Lund School of Architecture, and my job is to arrange Lund Architecture Symposium, in collaboration with the board of education.

Next Friday it's going down! 

I'm super thrilled to have been able to hand-pick a group of people that are really inspiring, and who are showing such a broad spectrum of aproaches to architecture.

Make sure to show up next Friday and even more important, come see the discussion on Saturday, thats usually when the sparks ignite!