Ateljé Rymd

Ateljé Rymd is an architecture, urban design and research practice exploring how design can help humanity thrive across changing and extreme environments. Sitting between art, science and engineering, the studio combines architectural imagination with material experimentation, computational design and a concern for human experience within the larger ecological systems that sustain life.

Its work spans architecture, urban design, public space, environmental research and speculative design, moving between the everyday and the extreme — testing one conviction at every scale: that ecological intelligence, technological innovation, material knowledge and architectural craft are what make a place, from a city street to a lunar surface, genuinely inhabitable.

Ateljé Rymd was founded by Joanna Lesna, a Polish architect and researcher based in Stockholm. She studied Architecture and Urban Planning at Poznań University of Technology before completing a master's degree in Computation in Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. Her thesis explored a reciprocal relationship between material and form: developing biopolymers, programming their material behaviour, and creating computational and fabrication tools that translated material performance directly into architectural design. This established a way of working in which inquiry and design are integrated processes that continuously inform one another, allowing new knowledge to emerge through making.

Her early professional experience in Berlin and Milan exposed her to a diverse range of architectural scales and contexts, from renovation and transformation to residential, mixed-use, urban and transport projects. She subsequently joined Bjarke Ingels Group in Copenhagen, where she worked across cultural, hospitality, infrastructure and mixed-use architecture, including The Twist at Kistefos Museum, CopenHill, Galeries Lafayette and Mars Science City, alongside high-rise and mixed-use developments. This first chapter at BIG introduced her to architecture shaped by bold conceptual ideas, ambitious public programmes and interdisciplinary collaboration, while teaching her how an architectural idea can operate simultaneously across scales — from urban strategy to material detail.

Joanna later moved to Tokyo, where she worked at Kengo Kuma & Associates. Across projects in Japan, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia, she developed a deeper engagement with materiality, craftsmanship and the cultural intelligence embedded in local construction traditions. Her work included hospitality, residential, commercial and cultural architecture, alongside computationally designed systems using recycled plastic. She also contributed to the winning competition proposal for the UBS office tower in Zürich.

Her interest in architecture under conditions of uncertainty led her to Hassell in London, where her practice expanded into design at the intersection of architecture, technology and extreme environments. She worked on a study for the European Space Agency investigating lunar habitats, robotic construction and self-sufficient building systems. At the same time, she was project architect for the Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Centre in Uganda — recognised with the RIBA International Award for Excellence and named Dezeen's Cultural Project of the Year. Working between a future habitat beyond Earth and a cultural project serving one of the world's largest refugee settlements brought two radically different contexts into dialogue. Both required questioning conventional assumptions about resources, infrastructure, climate and the role architecture plays in supporting human dignity and collective life.

Alongside her work in international practices, Joanna developed independent projects that allowed her to explore architecture through a more direct relationship between inquiry, design and making. Her work included eco-lodges and low-impact hospitality in the Bolivian rainforest, a private residential project, and the Komorebi Pavilion, an experimental installation exploring light, material and atmosphere that was exhibited at Charlottenborg and the Utzon Center. These projects became an important space for developing her own architectural voice, bringing together ecological thinking, material experimentation and a sensitivity to the relationship between people and place.

Following this period of independent work, Joanna returned to Bjarke Ingels Group for a second chapter, this time as an Architect ARB in its London studio. Where her first stint at BIG had introduced her to architecture at the scale of bold concepts and public programmes, this return let her apply what she had built in the years between: the material sensitivity developed in Japan, the speculative and systems-driven thinking shaped by space architecture, and the independence of voice she had cultivated through her own projects. Her work at BIG London included projects for NOT A HOTEL, including the Setouchi project in Japan, luxury residential towers at CityLife Milan, the Liwan Saadiyat Cultural District in Abu Dhabi, and a hospitality development on the Red Sea.

After relocating to Stockholm, Joanna joined LINK Arkitektur, where she worked on reuse and sustainable urban development while initiating internal development projects. This period deepened her interest in architecture as a field for inquiry and innovation, where new knowledge can become a driver of design and a means of addressing the environmental and social challenges facing the built environment. It was from here that she founded Ateljé Rymd.