Roemer van Toorn’s research is broadly interdisciplinary, with architecture, urbanism, and landscape architecture at its core. As architect, photographer, writer and as expert in architectural theory, history and visual culture, he particularly focuses upon architecture’s relation with the human and more-than-human environment. In other words, how architecture as technical cultural endeavour, through its own zone of competence, can contribute to a fulfilling, enriching and liberative life for all; both the human and more than-non-human; dares to create lives of sustained optimal well-being, justice and joy for all.
His current research at the UMA school of Architecture, Umeå University, Sweden, is about a becoming, an architecture of hospitality, one that breaks open the conventional way space and form is thought and used, one that displaces the binary dialectics of coloniser and colonised, the human against the non-human, the one against the other by introducing a third that belongs to both the one and the other, opening potential alternative and enjoyable horizons. Such a place of radical openness is about a margin; a profound edge, what has been called a “Thirdspace” where forms of emancipation can potentially blossom. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary according to Van Toorn. Such a site of radical possibility, concerns a multiplicity of folds and gaps in the fabric of the common experience that change the cartography of the perceptible, the thinkable and the feasible. As such, it allows for new modes of political construction of common objects and new possibilities of collective and individual enunciation. Instead of slipping into paternalism or control, the idea of such a radical openness is characterised by indeterminacy, nuance, openness, and the multitude of encounters it could generate. It is concerned with a cosmopolitical outlook, one that reimagines civilisation anew, welcoming co-existence, otherness, nature, the city and the countryside.
In 2024 he started the research group at the UMA School of Architecture "Making Architecture Politically." Instead of advancing a worldview of b/orders between people, nature and other lifeforms of disconnection, war and fortification in reaction to cosmopolitisation, our research group explores – by welcoming the global other – how architecture, landscape and urban design can contribute to communities and their situated cultures, as border-crossers; at best as a visionaries and practicioners capable of transforming a space of restriction into one of radical openess where we can live well with each other in a thick and complex present of multi-racial, multi-species, and multi-kinded realities.
In 2023 he started a new research entitled “The Power of Gentleness in Architecture. The Aesthetics of Hospitality,” which received initial funding from the new research centre UmArts, of Umeå University.
In 2022 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for his PhD thesis “Making Architecture Politically. From Fresh Conservatism to Aesthetics as a Form of Politics,” from the Estonian Academy of the Arts, Tallinn.
In 2019 two research volumes, funded by the Swedish Research fund Formas, published by Actar Publishers (New York, Barcelona) were co-edited by Van Toorn on ”Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects,” and ”After Effects Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research.” In the same year Van Toorn wrote and co-edited with Sangram Shirke "Celebrating Diversity, Radical Swedes. Towards a Cosmo-political Outlook."
Many of his publications listed can be found at the Roemer van Toorn, Umeå University website.