This thesis presents a discursive and historical investigation of the origins and causes of the design review in architectural education. The design review, jury or ”crit” i s an integral and central part of the contemporary paradigm for architectural education – the design studio. The thesis discusses previous research on the design review, which paints a gloomy picture of the learning possibilities of the review. The historical roots of the review are studied with the Swedish context as a focus, showing that the review in its contemporary form was adopted concurrently with the design studio paradigm during the 1990’s. Furthermore, interviews were carried out with instructors at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Results from the interviews point to several contradictions and issues in the discourse about the review. Seeing the concept and faculty of judgment as central to understand the implicit definition of the architect, as manifested in the review and in the canon of the discipline, these findings are the discussed and contextualised. / I detta examensarbete görs en diskursiv och historisk undersökning av kritikgenomgången i arkitektutbildningen. Kritikgenomgången utgör en central komponent i det samtida paradigmet för arkitektutbildning – studion. Examensarbetet går igenom och diskuterar aktuell forskning om kritikgenomgången, vilket ger en nedslående bild av kritikgenomgångens pedagogiska potential. Vidare undersöks kritikgenomgångens historiska rötter med fokus på den svenska kontexten, vilket ger vid handen att kritikgenomgången i sin nuvarande form fick sin roll i svensk arkitektutbildning under 1990-talet, alltså samtidigt med studioparadigmets genomslag. Dessutom redovisas resultaten av en intervjustudie med lärare vid KTH Arkitekturskolan, vilka visar att diskursen om kritikgenomgången innehåller flera motsägelser och problem. Resultaten av undersökningarna diskuteras sedan utifrån en förståelse av omdömet som centralt begrepp och förmåga för att förstå den implicita definition av arkitekten som manifesteras i kritikgenomgången och i disciplinens kanon.

This thesis project has been an investigation of the summer house phenomena, both from an historical point of view - the background and history of summer houses - looking at the emergence of the culture, their architectural programmatic experience, how they’ve change over time, as well as looking into specific reference projects, both for inspiration and clarity - some older houses, and others that are more modern. In addition to the research, and as the main part of the thesis project I have aimed to design a new small summer house of my own, to be placed on the small island in Mälaren where my family's current house is situated and where I have grown up, by using the knowledge I’ve gathered and the inspiration I have come across in order to create a project different from the one that is there today.

This research on the forces and forms of urbanization in the Costa Blanca, in the Mediterranean West coast, aims to rethink the collective creation of landscapes by putting side by side top-down landscape planning instruments with everyday activities of things and people that change landscapes in practice. Placed in the hyphen between the disciplines of anthropology and architecture, it is based on fieldwork done by the method of participant observation and, also, participant design. Landscapes transformed by mobile populations are a perfect site to study the difficulties in implementing the democratic approach of the European Landscape Convention. The convention defines landscape as it is perceived by its inhabitants while they constantly take part in its transformation from the inside. Though, the tools available for planners and landscape designers are heirs of a political and aesthetic understanding of landscape that fixes it either as a territory to govern or a view to admire. The research departs from the moment in which these tools are taught to architects in the school. It describes a series of courses about the topic of tourism in which students and teacher made together several experiments with the profession. An experiential methodology that continues along all the chapters wich are all practice based research. After setting the stage of the Costa Blanca in a non-representational way, through an exploration on the potential of narrative to recreate places, it develops a series of variations on the tools of the architect to work with planning. The research does not define a priori what should count as ‘tourism’, ‘spoiled’, ‘valuable’, ‘agricultural’ or ‘natural’ landscapes. Interested in the moments of enjoyment, it does pay special attention to the temporalities of landscape. Fictions, maps, summer houses, events, catalogues and agendas are all in the toolbox of the architect but here they are played in the minor key, to make variations to the major key that has a tendency to prevail. Each chapter pulls a different string from mesh of landscape ecologies of practice, and follows where it leads. The tools are thus presented anew through what was learnt in the fieldwork with lifestyle migrants that seek their place in the sun and local inhabitants that have had an active role in the urban transformations of the area. Building on scholarship in landscape architecture, anthropology, science studies, tourism, planning and speculative philosophy, it follows how actors learn to be affected in the material performance of different relations between people and landscapes. The chapters are built in counterpoint to one another, using narrative and different formatting to stress the accounts of practice and more traditional ethnography. The process of writing and presenting them becomes part of the research. Also, as ways of practice that emerge from landscape transformation related to tourism are described, the question of what making the landscapes of enjoyment does to the political and professional ways of knowing about landscape becomes a central thread of the thesis. In this, it explores how enjoyment cannot be produced, enjoyment can only happen in the collective co-production of landscape, in an undercommons where it becomes 'a task to do' - an agenda for keeping us indebted and thus engaged to each other in a shared landscape.