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Assistant Professor
Head of programme: Cultural Heritage, Transformation & Conservation
Institute of Architecture and Culture
Lars Rolfsted Mortensen
Lars Rolfsted Mortensen is an architect and assistant professor at the Royal Danish Academy, where he heads the MA programme Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Conservation. His research focuses on post-war infrastructural and industrial heritage. Photographic practice is central to his research, making unseen infrastructural landscapes visible for critical and aesthetic inquiry.
Infrastructure as heritage
Is infrastructure cultural heritage?
Should a highway, a quarry or a reservoir be considered part of our shared cultural heritage? Infrastructures permeate all layers of modern society and form the foundations for everyday life. In the current geopolitical climate, infrastructures have moved to the centre of political attention. However, infrastructural landscapes are often considered a necessary evil and are rarely perceived as aesthetic expressions of our cultural, political, and technological desires. Through my photographic practice, I strive to make the spaces and artefacts of infrastructural landscapes visible, tangible, and open to inquiry. I have contributed to the theoretical and methodological development of photography as empirical material within the phenomenological tradition, and developed taxonomies for identifying and analysing nodes in infrastructural networks.
The size, permanence and geopolitical reach of infrastructures make them unintentional monuments of our epoch – many of which will remain in our landscapes for centuries to come. The evolution of heritage charters has substantially expanded the realm of what can be considered heritage. Yet a wide gap remains between what falls within the potential scope of heritage and how liminal heritage objects, such as infrastructures, are managed and perceived. My research within critical heritage studies and energy humanities investigates the potentialities and dissonances of infrastructures, their environmental consequences, and the aesthetic and spatial characteristics of infrastructural landscapes.
ATLAS: Sustainable transformation strategies for post-war housing
My research-based teaching is currently focused on the collaborative project ATLAS developing sustainable transformation strategies for post-war public social housing. Taking an inclusive approach to the embedded cultural histories, material qualities, and architectural-aesthetic languages of the existing housing estates, the research and teaching aim to re-use and re-purpose as much of the existing structures as possible. The transformation strategies thus focus on developing subtle and precise architectural interventions that enhance and reframe the existing characteristics, materials and historical layers of the buildings.
In order to develop new architectural responses to the critical transgression of planetary boundaries, ATLAS takes a holistic approach to architectural practice and incorporates both the externalities of construction and the perspectives of the residents. Through documentation of resource landscapes, material flow analysis, and close collaboration with housing organisations, the project aims to connect the architectural strategies to both places and people beyond the site. The research project is structured in three iterative cycles, each of which consists of 1) comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis; 2) design and construction of full-scale building interventions; and 3) subsequent measurement, evaluation and publication. Master students work for a full semester with the housing estate and construct the full-scale intervention on site as a central pedagogic strategy for fostering knowledge of construction, maintenance, care and repair. ATLAS is a collaboration between the Centre for Sustainable Building Culture and DTU Sustain.
