Pia Palo

About
LinkedIn
piapalo@outlook.com

pia.palo@umu.se

I am an architect and urban designer, currently working as a PhD researcher at Umeå School of Architecture (UMA).  My interests lie at the intersection between the social and the physical, in understanding lived experiences and realities, and in how experimental and artistic processes can be used to think and talk about how and for whom we build our cities. In addition to research work, I teach at both BA and MA levels.

My ongoing PhD research is in critical studies of architecture and urbanism, and focuses on just urban transitions in the context of northern Sweden. I explore how spatial practice (and practitioners) can take on a transformative and productive role in imagining radical and inclusive futures beyond growth through theoretical and practical engagements with ideas of care and relationality.

Concept sketch - scaffolding-like addition to the existing building


Displace


MATERIAL RE-USE / SPECULATIVE DESIGN / QUALITATIVE AND SITUATED MAPPING / ADAPTIVE REUSE
Year: 2021
Site: The Railway Hotel, Jörn, Sweden
By: Pia Palo
Set in a degrowth scenario, where resource scarcity demands that abandoned buildings be torn down and their materials used for construction, the project imagines how this will affect communities that have experienced and are experiencing dramatic population changes, looking specifically at the small-town Jörn.

Through artistic research, with a strong focus on situated perspectives and local narratives, a proposal for transforming the old railway hotel in Jörn takes shape, that imagines how an unused building could be brought back to life and be adapted to become a space for interdisciplinary collaborations. Both the research methods and the proposal itself explore what an expanded field of architecture could mean.

The interest behind the project is to explore the intersection between a pragmatic look at resource efficiency and the soft values of historical layers contained within stuff, meaning mediated by matter.

The following questions guided the work:

(a) What happens to things, to buildings, after we have finished using them?
(b) Can buildings that are not occupied become the new material resource?
(c) What does the neglect and decay do to the self-image of a place? Of the people inhabiting it?
(d)How can the extraction and re-use of building materials be meaningful, can it be done through a process where it benefits the place of extraction and its community?

The old Railroad Hotel, Jörn


The proposal
Scaffolding, a strcuture that supports the existing building and opens up new spaces



Enabling new uses of the building. Workshop in the basement, community spaces on the ground floor, artist residency on the second floor.



The scaffolding-like structure creates verticality and visual conncetion between the different spaces.