The project aims to examine how an architectural experience can help to increase awareness and encourage solutions for the Baltic Sea issues. The essence of the project lies in the experience which will be embodied by an exhibition as well as a gathering space for the Baltic science community on a remote island called Lilla Båtskär, situated in the archipelago of Åland, Finland. The exhibition aims to explain the issue from different perspectives, categorized into three themes. The incisions, linked to the themes,  will serve as generators for creating awareness and understanding of the issue, while the The Science community function as a foundation to provide enhanced prerequisites for extended collaborations and exchange of expertise between the Baltic countries. The combination of these two faculties subsequently merges into a unique experience with a strong identity and attachment to the Baltic Sea.

The thesis examines the impact of perceived brightness and contrast balance in relation to the spatial volume; physical volume transforming into a perceived volume in light. Two static viewpoints of 20th century’s museum architecture have been tested to observe qualitative features in daylight entering through architecturally devised openings. Anders Liljefors’s “7 parameters of light” based on visual-physical theory and James Gibson’s perception factors relating to our visual field help evaluate the perceived qualities. The thesis directs towards understanding relationship of brightness and contrast perception with the perceived color of space and spaciousness of the architectural volumes. Individual experiment with physical mock-up replicating the spatial volumes in contextual sun altitudes as well as visual representation of analyzing perceptual parameters have been documented and discussed. Also, methodology includes a collective evaluation surveying observers’ perception of “lighting features” and “spatial features” seeing the fish-eye images of the viewpoints as if looking into the physical mock-up. The comparative analysis in this research is an attempt to contemplate qualitative observation tool as an objective reference in relation to the subjective experience for architectural lighting design process. The investigation follows case studies of two exhibition spaces designed by architects - Carlo Scarpa and Louis Kahn addressing both diffuse skylight and direct sunlight entering through architecturally devised openings.

This book, Quarry Stories - Architecture through Narrative Exploration, collects the process and proposals of our thesis, responding to the question: How can critical post-humanist philosophy, using stories as a tool, enhance our understanding of architecture and activate narratives in limestone quarries? We view the limestone quarries on Gotland as an example of humans’ relationship with nature: we take what we want and leave. Although significant for the industry, the quarries are troublesome from an ecological perspective. Rather than debating their existence or non-existence, we aim to explore their potential - what imaginaries can we envision for these sites?  We use the word ‘story’ to let narratives shape architecture, partially by writing stories for each quarry but also by including different narrative perspectives. We were curious to examine what architecture our entanglement with non-human actors can generate. We believe that stories can help us challenge our imagination and explore architecture from an alternative point of view.  While the outcome is three proposals for three different quarries on Gotland, we view the project as an exercise in exploring architecture through practical and artistic research. Here, narrative activation and critical post-humanist philosophy serve as an approach to architecture.

This thesis project is a case study of how to work with the built environment. It is a case study investigating the themes of renovation, transformation and adaptive reuse. By gathering historical research through archives, fieldwork on site and interviews I have developed one method of working with this existing building. This transformation project is a design proposal of an existing train station building that is threatened to be overturned and no longer serve its primary function as a train station. In this design proposal the existing train station will be transformed into an exhibition space for KTH.

The contaminated book as a cultural asset is presented from three perspectives: philosophy, microbiology and cultural studies including medieval studies. The prejudice of the microbe as the enemy of the collection is questioned. Instead, the microbe is brought to the fore and made contextually visible as a book-biographical sign: traces on the book, including microbial ones, can bear witness to fire, flood, evacuation, and historical epidemics. For this witnessing, different readings of 'world' and of 'dead/living' must be considered, working toward a theory of things. It is based on studies of objects in medieval anthologies in the holdings of the Leipzig University Library, which have also been studied using microbiological and molecular biological methods at the DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures in Braunschweig. For the determination of the book biographies, both collections form mutual references. A new readability of the 'world as a book' is shown, which is made readable through its DNA, but also through its cultivation needs. With the idea of the book as habitat, a new view of the relationship between cultural property and microbe is opened - against destructive contamination towards the microbe as innovation potential for collections.

While new approaches to displaying art free both the art and the viewer from overly didactic forms of curation, there have been very few attempts to examine how viewers negotiate meaning from art when no goal or directive is provided. While some see difference as the critical factor, others use similarity as a way to introduce new narratives. This dissertation research takes a close look at the kinds of things people observe in visual works of art to expose the specific ways that the offerings in the work are made knowable by its viewer and how different modes of presentation might affect the process. A paired design was developed to find out how juxtaposing works on dimensions of similarity and difference might affect what people see in individual paintings and whether the presence or absence of depictive content would be a factor. In three online experiments, participants were tasked with generating as many single words or short phrase responses as they could over a two-minute time period from a selection of modern and contemporary paintings – 32 abstract and 32 representational. In the first study, paintings were presented sequentially. In the next study, the same pictures were purposefully matched for color, composition, style, and thematic content. In the third study, the same pictures were re-paired to maximize difference. Pairing effected an overall decline in number of total comments for representational paintings compared to isolated single-view sequences. In contrast, significant increases were found for abstract art when the adjacent painting was also abstract. Significant consistency in response patterns for both art types across all three studies provide quantitative and content-based evidence for a normative level of engagement, with specific processing effects relative to art type.

Interactive Coast is a moving-image art installation that will mix 16mm film and digital footage. Inspired by the cyclical nature of the biological concept of succession, this installation will focus on human interactions with nature and architecture, specifically at the beaches on the East Coast of Florida. In its biological definition of the word, “Succession is the gradual transformation or creation of a biological community as new species move into an area and modify local environmental conditions” (Rehkopf 1581). The coast, once with its undeveloped tract of mangroves and sand dunes is now interspersed with construction, oil spills, and commercial development of natural habitats on the coast. The timeline of humanity on earth seems bleak, but may just be part of a cycle that ultimately leaves nature to one day take back its environment. My creative process of making this installation involves exploring and drawing critical conclusions about the effect of human development and activity on the cycles of the natural environment—with Hollywood beach as a visual, creative, and exploratory case study. The evolution of film stock succeeded by digital data, will act as a parallel motif in the project—this will serve as a form of a cycle, like the nitrogen or phosphorous cycle. The installation will place the viewer surrounded by three screens and observing the cycle take place. In the end, I hope that the installation will assist in drawing more attention to the current epoch of human destruction known as Anthropocene.

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A problem that exhibition halls have is the balance between having good indoor air quality andminimizing energy waste due to the naturally slow decrease of CO2 concentration, which causes Heat-ing, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning systems to keep ventilating empty halls when occupants have leftthe vicinity. Several studies have been made on the topic of CO2 prediction and occupancy predictionbased on CO2 for smaller spaces such as offices and schools. However, few studies have been madefor bigger venues where a larger group of people gather. An online machine learning model using theRiver library was developed to tackle this problem by predicting the CO2 ahead of time. Five datasetswere used for training and predicting, three with real data and two with simulated data. The resultsfrom this model was compared with three already developed traditional models in order to evaluate theperformance of an online machine learning model compared to traditional models. The online machinelearning model was successful in predicting CO2 one hour ahead of time considerably faster than thetraditional models, achieving a r2 score of up to 0.95.