Katja Hogenboom (Dr. Ir.) is an architect (Katja Hogenboom studio), educator (Academy of Architecture, Amsterdam and the Technical University Eindhoven), writer, photographer and researcher with a PhD in Architecture, Theory and History, from KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden. Her thesis on Situated Freedom, investigates architecture’s emancipating and sustainable potential, while considering the disciplinary expertise of the profession itself - its aesthetic experience.
Through her research and practice she explores strategic tools and concepts practicing an emancipatory architecture that engages possible alternatives and challenges domination, with the belief that we need to instigate modes of critical inquiry that dare to think ahead, are provisional and speculative, and invest in what can be done next. Her work develops through experimental and interdisciplinary explorations, drawing on the fields of art, film theory, theatre, architecture, and philosophy. Her methodology mobilizes an understanding of architecture that traces the aesthetic strategies employed in architectural projects, with a commitment to an emancipatory endeavor within the complexity of present reality.
She holds a Ma in Architecture from the TU Delft and has worked as project architect in several offices in Spain and the Netherlands: designing and realising housing and public buildings, among them regional police headquarters. In 2008 she started her own office; developing a practice where architecture, research, photography, and teaching form an integrated whole. Always in collaboration, the studio works on projects of all scales, ranging from spatial studies, to design of exhibitions, dwellings and public buildings.
Katja Hogenboom studio worked as architects in charge of the redesign of the interior of the Leiden university library, and designed a temporary exhibition for the Dutch Parliament on the digitalisation of political documents. KHS designed a 1000 m2 new floor on top of the existing university library in Leiden; The Asian Library. A library and workspace dedicated to the Asian collections of the library, which has as special feature a rooftop inner-garden. Together with Roemer van Toorn, KHS transformed an old church into a home with a library, in Umeå in Sweden.
Katja worked for the state architect of the Netherlands on research and education; setting up educational programs, doing research and curating work. She organized and curated masterclasses and was in charge, as chief editor, of a publication that documented the professional education of young architects who; besides doing work in Dutch offices where on the outlook for ideals in architecture. Katja worked as lecturer at the Umeå school of Architecture, Sweden. She has been a STO foundation visiting professor at KIT Department of Architecture in Karlsruhe teaching a studio and seminar (MA) in 2022/23.