WORK

OFFICE

Secretary is an architecture practice founded and directed by architect Rutger Sjögrim and theorist Helen Rix Runting. Operating across a range of media, Secretary's work explores the capacity of architecture to support a dignified life at the scale of the population in the late welfare states of the twenty-first century. We make architecture that is a political, experimental, and infrastructural.

Secretary has designed housing, industrial buildings, interiors, master plans, regional data archives, published books and essays, and undertaken concept design for film. Secretary’s built work includes the permanent public art installation Solfångare & Ljusbrytare in Tensta, Stockholm, Sweden (a collaboration with sound artist Åsa Stjerna for Micasa through Stockholm Konst, 2024); and Generatorn, a 112-apartment multi-generational housing scheme in Linköping, Sweden (a collaboration with architect-developer Spridd and Paris-based architects Septembre, 2023). Secretary’s unbuilt work includes speculative masterplans, reports, case studies, and competition entries, much of which has been produced in collaborations with other practices, including Amelyn Ng/Friends Make Work, Maroš Krivý, Sibling, Loren Adams and Andrew Burrows, rellam, and Brrum, and previous colleagues within the practice, including Karin Matz (2017-2023), Gaudy Orejuela (2022-2023), and Elise Jensen (2024-2025). The practice also works as architects within the field of fine arts; our multi-media installations have been exhibited in Sweden (ArkDes, Form/Design, and Dunkers Konsthall), Japan (Tokyo Design Moves), China (Bi-City Biennale Shenzhen), Georgia (Tbilisi Architecture Biennale), and Estonia (Tallinn Architecture Biennale), as well as Norway (Nasjonalmuseet) and Australia (MPavilion) where it is included is in permanent collections. Our self-published housing study 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm (2021) was awarded the Stockholm Association of Architects’ Guldrummet prize and is a fixture in Swedish architecture offices. Founded in 2017, Secretary emerged out of the artistic collective Svensk Standard (2008-).

HELEN RIX RUNTING

Helen is an architectural theorist and urban designer. Her work explores how architecture organizes life at the scale of the population. Helen writes, edits, reviews, and makes objects and research in relation to this theme: she has published in e-flux architecture, Avery Review, monu, and Journal of Architecture, and writes regularly for the magazine Arkitektur; she is also co-author of 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist's Guide to New Stockholm (2021) and co-editor of Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City (2023) and Architecture and Feminisms: Economies, Ecologies, Technologies (2017). She is also copyeditor on a range of contemporary publications addressing architecture and the city. Before starting Secretary, she worked with master planning projects in Australia, Vietnam, Finland, and Sweden; since 2017, she has led a number of Secretary's exhibition projects, research collaborations, and design processes. She holds a PhD in Architecture from KTH in Stockholm (2018) and is co-curator, together with Ulrika Flink, of the Bruges Triennial 2027. As a bi-lingual migrant, transdisciplinary practitioner, and practice-based researcher, her work is driven by the conviction that through another architecture, another world is possible.

HELEN@SECRETARY.INTERNATIONAL
+46 (0)72 313 66 41

RUTGER SJÖGRIM

Rutger Sjögrim is an architect (MSA / MSc. Arch, KTH) and educator with two decades of industry experience ranging from leading early-stage concept, competition, and visualization work, to design delivery, detailing and construction coordination. As the local liaison architect in international CSA-teams he has guided numerous projects through planning and permitting. At Secretary his role as a director focuses on leading collaborative design processes as well as driving the office’s work on critical image making and speculative design. His works have been exhibited across Sweden and internationally, and the video installation Housework acquired by the National Museum in Oslo is now part of their permanent collection. As a lecturer in architecture at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm he has supervised thesis projects and run design studios at masters level for close to a decade on themes such as urban design, leisure, health and wellness, public, collective and common infrastructures, global exchange, supply chains and borders, agricultural domesticities and rural production, stretching the architectural project from the scale of site and building to that of the city and territory.

RUTGER@SECRETARY.INTERNATIONAL
+46 (0)73 68 243 86

SECRETARY AB
HARPSUNDSVÄGEN 76
124 58 BANDHAGEN
SWEDEN

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Typeset in Union
Logo by Tristan Main
Photos of Solfångare and Ljusbrytare by Linda Hutchins
Photos of Appartment for 1855 People by Form/Design Center
Photos of Moodmanager by Nasjonalmuseet for kunst, arkitektur og design
Photos of Generatorn by Johan Dehlin
Rendered image of Genratorn by Artefactorylab
Stills from Aniara courtesy of SF Studios
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(C) SECRETARY - STOCKHOLM - 2025