agenda

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

Gravity and Grace - a personal selection of Swedish housing projects.

The lecture presents a personal selection of Swedish housing projects, spanning from the early 1900s to the present day. The scope ranges from large-scale developments to individual dwellings.

The selection is made through the eyes of an architect — a perspective that may occasionally differ from that of a historian. These projects highlight Sweden’s original contributions to housing, where the everyday and the experimental often coexist — sometimes within the same project.

Mikael Bergquist is an architect and writer educated at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He runs his own practice in Stockholm, focusing on single-family houses as well as interventions in existing buildings.

Bergquist leads a master's studio at KTH, exploring various aspects of housing. He has written extensively and curated numerous exhibitions and books. His most recent publication is Centre and Periphery: Five Houses by Mikael Bergquist (Park Books, Zurich, 2025).

He has participated in the Alternative Histories exhibition in London (2019), the Architecture Foundation’s 100 Day Studio (2020), and the Porto Academy summer school during its visit to Sweden (2023).

The conference is thematically focused on the Sub-Ore-Mountains region, roughly defined by the Ústí nad Labem and Karlovy Vary regions, or by the areas of existing surface brown coal mines and those already reclaimed, yet sharing a similar industrial past. Presentations will address topics related to cultural landscapes, heritage conservation, industrial heritage, nature protection, archaeology, and history (among others), including international contributions from the German side of the Ore Mountains, specifically the UNESCO World Heritage site Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří. A separate section will feature shorter presentations by students from Czech universities who, as part of their studies, have focused on one of the aforementioned fields and directed their interest specifically toward the Sub-Ore-Mountains region.

Registration is possible via the link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/KLS4cZ1wPr, no later than Wednesday, November 5, 2025, by 10:00 PM (CET).

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

What Housing Owes People

The UK has been at the vanguard of a 40 year neoliberal housing experiment and is in a state of emergency. In the light of multiple overlapping emergencies, a new architecture of the home is needed. One that is more social, more adaptable, more climate resilient, and that gives agency to people and communities.

Astrid Smitham is an architect and academic based in London, and co-founder of APPARATA. APPARATA are an architecture, design and research studio that create convivial and adaptable spaces and objects. They work foundationally with how material, environmental and social realms are enmeshed and interact with each other, addressing issues around social bonds, repair, dematerialisation, altering typologies and agency. Their work has won various awards including the RIBA Neave Brown Award for Housing and a Civic Trust Award and been nominated for the Stirling Prize and the European Collective Housing Award. Astrid teaches architecture at Kingston University and at the Architectural Association. 

We invite all students and employees to join Anežka Mervartová for yoga classes promoting harmony and energy. Mats are provided. The classes are free of charge.

We exercise in the atrium near the plaster room.

Housing Otherwise

Practices of Care and Diversity in Vienna’s Housing Model

Housing Otherwise raises the question: how can we move towards a more just future of living together? What can an architecture of empathy, solidarity, generosity, and circularity offer to housing? In a time of multiple crises—from the climate catastrophe to growing social segregation—the world is suffering from a housing crisis. Housing is not merely a matter of shelter; it entails creating better living conditions for all, encompassing affordability, diversity in living concepts, and new forms of sharing and community.

The city of Vienna has a long history of social housing, from the settler movement and the housing blocks of Red Vienna to pioneering projects such as the One-Kitchen House. But where do we stand today? How can a feminist approach to social housing be practiced, taught, and imagined? This lecture offers historical, contemporary, and imagined housing experiments in Vienna, seeking multi-perspective and previously underrepresented concepts of cohabitation to advance spatial justice in housing.

Bernadette Krejs (PHD) is an architect and Senior Scientist at the Research Unit of Housing and Desing at TU Wien. Her work is situated in a transdisciplinary research field between architecture, housing and visual culture. Her awarded dissertation focuses on the media representation of housing through digital platforms. She has extensive international teaching experience (DAE Design Academy Eindhoven) and is co-founder of the international PHD Program on New Social Housing. She is editor and author of numerous books, Changing Spatial Practices (transcript, 2025), Vienna: The End of Housing (as a Typology) (Spektor Books, 2024), Instagram-Wohnen (transcript, 2024). Her work has been published in various exhibitions, AGENCY OF BETTER Living (La Biennale di Venezia 2025), PLATFORM AUSTRIA (La Biennale di Venezia 2021). She is Margarete Schütte Lihotzky Project Fellow (2024) and LINA – European Architecture Platform Fellow (2023). She is co-founder of the queer feminist collective Claiming*Spaces and co-founder of the activist research practice Palace of Un/Learning where she collaborated with various institutions, including Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona, Oslo Architecture Triennale, DAZ – Deutsches Architektur Zentrum Berlin and many more.