Project
“Man started with two basic ways of controlling environment: one by avoiding the issue and hiding under a rock, tree, tent or roof (this led ultimately to architecture as we know it) and the other by actually interfering with the local meteorology, usually by means of a campfire, which, in a more polished form, might lead to the kind of situation now under discussion. Unlike the living sp
ace trapped with our fore- bears under a rock or roof, the space around a campfire has many unique qualities which architecture cannot hope to equal, above all, its freedom and variability.”
Reyner Banham
Housing will work as an over-arching theme in the studio this coming year. Stockholm is currently the fastest growing city in Europe, with more than thirty thousand new citizens each year.At the same time the production of housing is both insufficient in terms of numbers, the need according to Länstyrelsen is between 15-20 000 new dwellings yearly, but only around 8 000 is actually built and the costs for production has exploded from 10 840 SEK/square meter in 1998 to 32 977 in 2011 (statistics from Statis- tiska centralbyrån, Statistics Sweden). Since the mid-seventies we have also witnessed how the view on housing has completely changed – from being understood as a social right for all citizens to a commodity governed by market forces.Within this shift lies also questions about what a house and home means, how it influences what we understand as a family, how it spatially governs our notions of individuality, collectivity and everyday politics.The production of housing could possibly be said to hold some of the most important issues facing architecture and architects today. It concerns the foundations of society and the role architecture plays in defining it. The first assignment will be to react to the report “En effektivare plan- och bygglovsprocess” ordered by Swedish housing minister Stefan Attefall (KD) and published 7 May 2013.This report outlines a proposal to radically deregulate the current planning process. Mostly concerning general and detail plans, but also what private homeowners will be allowed to do to a property without seek- ing a building permit. If this report was to be implemented, what kind of impact could this have in a neighbourhood consisting of single-family houses and row houses located between Fittja and Alby? We will further examine how contemporary building materials and technologies relate to the production of architecture. New modes of production and new materials have continually developed and changed during the last few decades, at the same time it has become difficult to trace how this development have transformed the way we understand architecture.Traditional modernistic ideals as honest accounts of material, function and construction have given way to an increasing occupation with architecture as image, which in turn has lead to an increasing separation between architecture/construction and form/structure. The ambitions in this course are to see if it is possible to reformulate these separations. Is it possible to think architecture that, instead of routinely obsessing with style and external attributes, actually relates to contemporary building materials, construction technologies and modes of production? Or the other way around, what can emerge if the relationship between structure and architecture is held open and unrelated? The topics of economy, material and building procedures will be tested in a relatively small assignment by analysing the site and the housing projects from the mid-seventies and then propose extensions, re-modelling and re-building. Our aim is to link a hands-on and down to earth project with a more theoretical approach where we discuss contemporary politics, new ways of living and how to interpret our modernist history. Teachers
Tor Lindstrand (Stockholm) is an architect and assistant professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH-A), a co-owner of the office of Larsson, Lindstrand and Palme and currently working in a collaborative research project on Power, Space and Ideology at KTH-A and Södertörn University. He is also the co-founder of International Festival and Economy. this-is-economy.com/ http://international-festival.org/
Anders Wilhelmson is an architect and professor at The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and has for ten years been professor at The Royal University Collage of Fine Arts in Stockholm. He is running his own practice, Wilhelmson architects AB. In 2006 he founded Peepoople AB, a company engaged in delivering hygiene and sanitation to the worlds urban slums, refugee camps and emergencies. http://www.wilhelmson.se/
Erik Wingquist is an architect working in the office Testbedstudio and a teacher at KTH-A, Erik has been working for Europan with organizing architectural competitions. http://www.testbedstudio.com/
Karin Matz is an architect working at Vera Arkitekter and running her own office Karin Matz Arkitekt Karin is a member of the Swedish Architecture collective Svensk Standard and has had her work published in numerous international magazines. http:// www.karinmatz.se/
