Making is More: Exploring Latent Meanings and Capacities of Architecture’s Concept CONSTRUCTION

Doktorsavhandling, 2026

Making is More is a research into one of architecture's prime concepts, i.e. construction. It is an inquiry into how we think about, attend to, and work with it, and a search for what remains concealed due to the prevailing conceptual framing. In architecture, construction is primarily conceptualised as a technological knowledge domain that instrumentally addresses its realisation and performance. Though important, this approach is reductionistic and fails to take construction’s more comprehensive capacities into account. This is why I argue that the habits of thinking about construction as technological concept and practice need to be scrutinised, questioned and criticised. 

In architectural construction the analytical way of thinking dominates. It is conditioned by a logic of parsing in individualised entities that are abstracted and made autonomous from each other and their contexts. The generative complexity emerging from interactions between things is veiled or disappears altogether. This research is an informed response to this general problem. It prioritises connections, relational dynamics, collective agency, mutual influences and contingency. Besides, construction is conceived as a domain determined by an intricate reciprocity between forms (things and objects) and processes (dynamic, fleeting, generative, transformative), and one that is affected by the specific circumstances and occurrences applying within event-spaces. 

Architecture is acknowledged as a technological practice that uses technical means and produces technical ends; but the technological is seen as a (cultural and political) venture that is rich in imagination, creativity and effort, and that cannot be reduced to the practical and feasable. The overall aim is to think through the concept of construction and what it affords, to show that it is possible to conceive construction in other ways, and in so doing, bring latent alternative capacities to light. The objective is to generate and evoke different connections and trajectories and not to solve problems by means of rational reasoning and proof. This work is thought of as a map, rather than a program or a plan. It depicts a territory to explore, rather than tracing one path that directs to instrumental and clearly identifiable goals and ensuing results. It is the result of an endeavour to understand construction in multiple ways, to address it from the point of view of complexity rather than simplification, and from connections and situated assemblages instead of the dissected and scattered analytical creations that currently dominate the field.