team
WE ARE A MULTIDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH COMMUNITY.
The research project is anchored in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen.
Svava Riesto
Researcher and project leader
Svava Riesto’s research centres on the 20th century urban landscapes and their becoming, uses, cultural meanings and legacies. She is concerned with how inclusive and diverse histories can contribute to just and sustainable landscape futures.
Svava is Associate Professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She studied art history at the Arctic University of Tromsø, Freie Universität Berlin and University of Copenhagen, where she also gained her PhD in landscape architecture. She has worked for several years in community-based heritage and participatory design and is passionate about how researchers can engage with local communities and with various publics.
Svava has published widely and received the Eslargart award in 2014 for her research on Danish landscape design history. She is author of Biography of an Industrial Landscape: Carlsberg’s Urban Spaces Retold (AUP 2017), which examines the uses of heritage in a large urban project around the financial crisis in 2008. Svava is interested in collaborative knowledge-creation, as for example in the interdisciplinary exhibitions Public Space in European Social Housing: Living heritage (EU-HERA 2020-21) and the experimental European book (ed. Havik, Pint, Steiner) Vademecum – 77 minor terms for writing urban places (NAi 2020).
Henriette Steiner
Researcher and project leader
Henriette Steiner’s work investigates the cultural role and meaning of architecture, cities, and landscapes. She wants to rethink how we can understand the cities and landscapes we have inherited from the 20th century. She also wants to contribute to research and research organization that takes into account the invisible economies of care and collaboration.
Henriette is Associate Professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK, and has been a researcher or visitor at various schools of architecture, including ETH Zurich and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Henriette’s work is widely published and her most recent books are co-written with Kristin Veel. Tower to Tower – Gigantism in Architecture and Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2020) critically reviews the West’s cultural ambition to construct gigantic buildings and digital infrastructures in light of today’s urban and societal sustainability challenges. Touch in the Time of Corona – Reflections on Love, Care, and Vulnerability in the Pandemic (De Gruyter, 2021) is an open-access book on the spatial and affective consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen
Project postdoctoral researcher and architectural historian
Jannie Rosenberg Bendsen holds a master’s degree and PhD from the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her dissertation was on architecture history writing. Jannie is a postdoctoral researcher at Copenhagen University’s Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, working on Women in Danish Architecture with collecting and reviewing archival material.
Besides being the former editor of the Danish journal Arkitekten, Jannie has worked at the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the Aarhus School of Architecture.
She has written books on Danish architecture history in the 20th century and the protection of buildings: Drømmen om eget hus. Statslånshuse 1933-1959 (Strandberg Publishing, 2021)- link Drømmen om eget hus – Statslånshuse 1933-1959 – Strandberg Publishing A/S og Restaureringsarkitekt og arkitekturhistoriker: Statslånshusene viser, hvor spændende og gedigne huse man kan få trods begrænsninger – byrummonitor.dk, Tingbjerg: Vision og virkelighed (Strandberg Publishing 2020) Tingbjerg – vision og virkelighed – Strandberg Publishing A/S and Fredet: Bygningsfredning i Danmark 1918–2018 (Strandberg Publishing 2018) Fredet – Bygningsfredning i Danmark 1918 til i dag – Strandberg Publishing A/S. Jannie has also worked as an editor for the Danish architectural journal Form til velfærd.
Mathilde Merolli
Communications and media manager
Mathilde Merolli holds a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Copenhagen. She works as a communications officer in the Department of Food and Ressource Economics at the University of Copenhagen.
Mathilde is interested in storytelling, particularly the intersection between narrative devices and strategic communications. She has worked as a copywriter for several years, specializing in NGO communication with a strong interest in climate issues and global development.
Mathilde is on the board of the humanitarian aid organization CARE Denmark that works with climate adaption in development countries. She spent six month with the organization in Tanzania documenting mitigation programmes for small scale farmers in villages around Moshi affected by climate change.
Liv Løvetand
Visual communications specialist
Liv Løvetand holds a degree in design from the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen. Since 2016, she has worked in the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, where she teaches visual communication and design process methods.
In her work as a designer, Liv is occupied with architecture and graphic design.
Frida Irving Søltoft
Project employee
Frida Irving Søltoft is taking her master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Copenhagen. She was born and raised in Østerbro, Copenhagen, but has lived in various countries in the Middle East. While living in Palestine, she worked for the Palestine Cinema Days film festival.
Frida is interested in gender and its representation in architecture, urban planning, and botany. She has been interested in renaming of streets in Carlsberg Byen, Copenhagen, and the renaming of different Danish plants.
Mathilde Lundt Larsen
Project employee
Mathilde Lundt Larsen holds a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Copenhagen. In her thesis, she wrote about the landscape architect Agnethe Muusfeldt (1918-1991), focusing on the architect’s commitment to planting dense and lush landscapes, and how this makes her work relevant today.
In her work as project employee, Mathilde investigates and systematizes archival documents.
Past and present students
- Josefin Hilton
- Helena Maria Berggren
- Henrik Færgemann Hansen
- Esther Rothe Urioste
- Maja Styve
- Linnea Sundstrøm
- Ida Linnea Odds Holmstrup
- Alida Helene Buch Hansen
- Anne Pind
Advisory Board
Barbara Penner
Professor of Architectural Humanities, UCL London
Barbara Penner is Professor in Architectural Humanities at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
Barbara has authored and co-edited numerous books on gender, space, and architecture, among others Bathroom (2013), Newlyweds on tour: Honeymooning in nineteenth-century America (2009), Ladies and gents: Public toilets and gender (2009), and Gender space architecture: An interdisciplinary introduction (1999). Her focus is presently on the work of the American houser, Catherine Bauer Wurster, and she wrote the foreword to the recently reissued edition of Modern Housing (University of Minnesota Press, 2020).
Meike Schalk
Associate Professor, KTH Stockholm
Meike Schalk is Associate Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm.
Meike’s research combines critical inquiry into discourses of sustainability, democracy and inclusion in urban planning and design with practice-oriented research methods. She has co-edited several books including Caring for Communities (2019), Architecture and Culture: Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects in Architecture (Taylor & Francis, 2017), and Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections (AADR, 2017).
DESPINA STRATIGAKOS
Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, Professor of Architecture, University at Buffalo
Despina Stratigakos currently serves as the University at Buffalo’s Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence.
Her research explores how power and ideology function in architecture, whether in the creation of domestic spaces or of world empires. She is the author of Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020), Where Are the Women Architects? (2016), Hitler at Home (2015), and A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008), which won the German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize and the Milka Bliznakov Prize. Despina is also the editor of A Cultural History of the Home in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury 2020).