Architecture in Effect by Actar Publishers

Rethinking the Social in Architecture Making Effects That architecture serves as the setting for social actions, activities, and content is not a new idea. That the architectural project can precipitate crucial social change, even transgression, is a far more modern and disputed claim. Spatial design in society has recently shifted away from universal solutions toward satisfying specific market-orientated interests. The time is now to reclaim architecture’s dialogic, productive role in understanding and shaping political, economic, ecological, and cultural transformations. The radicality of architecture is renewed in the exploration of novel and unforeseen possibilities: making effects. Edited by Sten Gromark Jennifer Mack Roemer van Toorn

To the Memory of Zygmunt Bauman 1929â&#x20AC;&#x201C;2017

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects

Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

006

Architecture’s Socio-Logics

018

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack and Roemer van Toorn

Dana Cuff

The Welfare State and Beyond…

038

The Museum and the Magazine: Notes on the Historiography of Swedish Modern Architecture Christina Pech

056

Pomophobia and Feminism: Revisiting the Swedish Postmodern Discourse

076

Conjuring Spirits: Capitalism and the Anthroposophic Configuration of Swedish Postmodern Architecture Catharina Gabrielsson

094

Postmodernism Unfinished? Forging the Humanist Subject in New Belgrade Tijana Stevanović

112

Architecture’s Red Tape: Construction of Government Buildings in Sweden Erik Sigge

124

Going Whole Hog: Merging Ecobranding and Park Politics in the Smart City Maria Hellström Reimer

142

A Tour of the Palimpsests of House of Psychiatry, Uppsala Ebba Högström

154

Outlining Platform Utopianism: The Architecture of Opening Up the Future Fredrik Torisson

Towards New Subjectivities

176

The Illusory Autonomy of the Real Estate Interior Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot

190

At the Western Side a Dead-end Park-slot: On ‘Situated Knowledges and the Science Question’ in Urban Planning and Design Katja Grillner

Helena Mattsson

212

Voices from the Inside: Residents’ Experiences in The Bois-le-Prêtre Alteration Project, Paris, 2013 Katrin Paadam & Sten Gromark

232

Restoring the Public: Case Study Fittja

240

Million Program Kitchens: Reconstructing the Welfare State

248

An Incomplete Guide to Faith Spaces in Stockholm

256

Urban Cultural Heritage and “Glocal” Spaces: An Interview with Stockholm City Museum Staff Ragnhild Claesson

Urban Architectural Explorations of the Social

274

Encounters, Intraventions and Matters of Care: Towards Responsible and Situated Making Practices Alberto Altés Arlandis

298

Acting in Common: Critical-Creative Participation in Controversial Urban Development Projects Meike Schalk, Apolonija Šušteršič & Gunnar Sandin

316

Architectural Imagineering and the Semblance of Dialogue Gunnar Sandin

334

Any-Space-Whatever: The Public Sphere of the Seattle Central Library Katja Hogenboom

364

From House to Square: Three Social Experiments Fran Cottell & Marianne Mueller

380

Greenhouse Doppelgänger Deposed: an indexical prototype about parastructures, anarchives, and the social (hyperobjective) pedestal Luis Berríos-Negrón

424

The Society of the And: Rethinking the Social—The Bewildering Interdependence of Our Times Roemer van Toorn

462

Authors’ Biographies

Thordis Arrhenius Erik Stenberg

Jennifer Mack

Architecture’s Socio-Logics Dana Cuff __ Director, cityLAB – UCLA

Architecture’s Socio-Logics_ Dana Cuff

Architectural discourse has struggled to find its footing in the post-millennial torrent of significant cultural, political, environmental, and economic events. Not since modernism’s clear social program was articulated in the first half of the 20th century have architects and urbanists been able to construct a stable platform either to rest upon or to resist. In 2011, the architectural scholars and practitioners writing in these volumes were awarded five years’ support from Sweden’s national government to create a “strong research environment.” But instead of arguing for a new school of thought which would then attract acolytes and fuel detractors, the intention of this volume is to “rethink the social.” It opens to its readers a mature conversation about architecture’s agency. Like a dinner party that has waxed and waned over five years at workshops and conferences, and over shared research and writing, the conversation has developed certain themes. There is coherence without ideological strictures in the varied studies of “architecture as the site of new revolutions, transformations, and collectivities.” The guiding question is: How can architecture actively engage the social, be that through the built environment, professional practice, or architectural scholarship? A shared, critical recognition of global, local, and disciplinary conditions produces myriad informed responses from the contributors. While Rethinking the Social is a culmination of social changes within architectural scholarship and practice, it is by no means an endgame. The range of both topics and methods invites readers to imagine how their own contributions to the conversation might add to this exploration of architecture and social change. It turns out that we’re all welcome to the party. The discussion of architecture’s socio-logics matters. Not only does the discipline’s relevance lie in the balance, but its ethical, practical, and intellectual agendas are likewise implicated. The participants never imagined the specific tumultuous events ahead, even as they acknowledged the sea changes already underway. Reclaiming architecture’s social, political, and cultural terrain could not have begun at a more critical historical moment. The Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement held promise that has since been undermined, as the role of the public sphere on a global scale blossomed from Cairo to Hong Kong. In 2011, it was unimaginable that the Syrian prodemocracy uprising would yield more than 5 million refugees in the next six years, simultaneously collapsing the global space that once separated Europe from the Middle East. As the crisis of transnational migration grows, nations and cities from Jordan to Stockholm reevaluate their principles of hospitality, along with all forms of their public imaginary. On another critical front, the Paris climate accord of 2016 demonstrated worldwide responsibility for reversing global warming, and in 2017 when the United States revoked its

007

support, leaders from China and India to California and Italy solidified their resolve. And in 2008, the world tipped more urban than rural, a trend that is advancing so rapidly that by 2050 nearly 70% of us will be living in cities. Global urbanization’s increasingly exaggerated income inequality means that cities strain to provide the housing necessary for people of all income groups. According to Oxfam, in 2017 just 8 men own as much as the 3.6 billion people who make up half the world’s population. To paraphrase the progressive, American politician Bernie Sanders, if they’ve got the money and we’ve got the people, socially-minded architects have a whole lot of work to do. To begin rethinking the social in architecture is to reimagine the “people” that we’ve “got.” Built environment research inherently parallels our tacit conceptions of the building’s occupants and city’s residents. Critical historiographical evidence in many of the following chapters makes apparent our many “blind spots” and repressed others in buildings, cities, as well as research. Over recent decades, sociality among architects’ people has grown more full-bodied, moving from a disjointed array of behaviors (circulating, privacy-seeking, way-finding) to a skeletal “user” with more complex, situated actions (housing for the elderly, suburban dwellers), and eventually to affective subjects. With the latter, the user becomes a subject with emotions and desires that offer architecture an affective dimension. When the aesthetic, formal terrain is recuperated, architecture can flaunt its sensual, guilty-pleasures. Throughout this disciplinary evolution, the individual is privileged over the social. Agency remains tied to persons, and persons –be they individual architects or subjects, remain the object of investigation. This volume goes further, building upon theory that actors socially construct their worlds, expanding subjects into “makers” of the physical environment. The creative, critical engagement of arts practices demonstrate how quasi-architectural interventions and “ethical spectacles” can construct a new commons. What more can progressive architects and architectural researchers actually do? In the postmodern period, the superficial response was “not much,” when from the 1970s through the New Urbanists of the 90s, the turn from modernist spatial politics not only sent architects and theorists to question the possibility of social transformation, but into the arms of capital. Current disciplinary soul-searching and our politically fraught times lead the authors here to look more closely at postmodernism’s contributions and to reanimate modernism itself with the Nordic “functionalism.” Again and again, the essays ask instead: How can architecture offer possibilities for effecting the change we want to see in the world? Powerful, clear responses include dismantling existing narratives of growth, marshalling feminism’s political theories and subjects, shifting from critique to action,

Architecture’s Socio-Logics_ Dana Cuff

and reconsidering practices and participation that make the built environment. Lucid reflection upon history and our contemporary circumstances points to directions for the near future. This emphasis on projective and speculative scholarship is one the volume’s most significant themes. It should be no surprise that the right questions could be asked in Sweden, where modernism was a humanist undertaking in the first half of the 20th century, dubiously recast into massive housing developments in the 60s (a topic addressed in a number of essays). Those same Million Program housing blocks have become an architectural symbol of political global reality, now occupied by thousands of Muslim immigrants who, depending who you ask, either have no opportunities to integrate into the cities that surround them, or have no incentive to do so. A critical awareness of the Swedish welfare state’s transmutation makes the totalizing nature of neoliberalism more viscerally apparent, a perspective several authors creatively deploy. In turn, this opens a clearing for resistance, but beyond that, for repositioning architecture as a cultural logic with genuine agency in our present political economy. The studied focus on specific architectural cases evident in the following chapters keeps material evidence close at hand. All the evidence accumulates, and its coherence converts this collection into a text that moves forward discourse about the social in architecture. The scholars and practitioners call their collaboration “Architecture in Effect,” a sly turn of the English phrase “in effect” to suggest the discipline’s agency. It emphasizes architectural practices, operations, and speculations whether apparent or latent. “In effect” emphasizes a strong but hidden force; I could say: “Architecture in effect constructs our shared reality.” “A physical wall is, in effect, a claim to power through territory.” The phrase can be used in a different way to describe an active, influential practice: “Surveillance in effect in public space chills political discourse.” In this use “architecture in effect” means that architecture is itself influential: “We are all subject to architecture in effect in the city.” Both uses of the phrase mobilize thinking into action, which is, in effect, the very nature of design.

009

Next pages: Photos Roemer van Toorn

011

US Armed Recruiting Station, Times Square, New York City, United States of America

013

Homeless, New York City, United States of America

015

Garbage City, Zabbaleen, Cairo, Egypt

017

The architecture of occupation. The Israeli apartheid barrier running between the Shuafat refugee camp and Pisgat Zeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ev

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects

Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn Editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Introduction

Yes, capitalism and globalism move the spheres of power in ways that elude agency while also constructing it. But architects can be agents of change; they can construct new arenas of production and new desires for emancipation. (Deamer 2016: 35) First and foremost, a utopia is an image of another universe, different from the universe one knows or one knows of. In addition, it anticipates a universe originated entirely by human wisdom and devotion. But the idea that human beings can replace the world-that-is with another and different world, a world entirely of their own making, was almost wholly absent from human thought before the advent of modern times. (Bauman 2007: 97–98; emphasis added) That architecture serves as the setting for social actions, activities, and content is not a new idea. That the architectural project can precipitate crucial social change, even transgression, is a far more modern and disputed claim. Spatial design in society has recently shifted away from mass emancipation toward what is often described as “identity politics.” In this new vein, scientific and professional discourses about architectural design that once emphasized collective social change and improvement now often revolve around how architecture contributes to or promotes health, well-being, and, ultimately, happiness or sensuous experience for individuals.1 For this reason, the time is nigh to reclaim architecture’s role in effecting political, economic, ecological, and cultural change. In Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects, we explicitly interrogate architecture as the site of new revolutions, transformations, and collectivities. The realization of architectural projects in the built environment represents the accumulated effects of social and cultural forces negotiating varying definitions and visions of an emerging world. In turn, the material resultants of making have repercussions and effects upon human behavior, and they condition, constrain, and produce new social relations. These repercussions and effects are sometimes consciously devised (and occasionally hidden) as elements of intended social controls, as when a square is planned to permit public speakers to be heard or, conversely, when plantings and furniture around the same square do not allow listeners to congregate in certain spaces. As sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues, Previous page: Rethinking the Social in Architecture, Closing event at the Bildmuset, 8 February 2013, Artcampus, Umeå University. Photo: Tobias Westerlund

1. On the concept of sensuous spatial experiences, see Henri Lefebvre’s late-discovered manuscript, written in 1974 (Lefebvre 2014).

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Making Effects

019

It is around places that human experience tends to be formed and gleaned, that lifesharing is attempted to be managed, that life meanings are conceived, absorbed and negotiated. And it is in places that human urges and desires are gestated and incubated, that they live in the hope of fulfillment, run the risk of frustration—and are indeed, more often than not, frustrated and strangled. (Bauman 2007: 81) Effects may thus be unintended or aleatory, thereby delimiting actions, raising constraints, even denigrating or prohibiting emancipatory acts of empowerment and dignity. But they still have power in relation to the social. As Susan Fainstein (2010) contends, it is critically important for makers of spaces to approach questions of justice, or “the just city,” by prioritizing social concerns over “growth.” Architecture can be used for many purposes, including abusive ones, and abusive architecture is often far easier to implement than architecture that promotes a much-desired situated freedom (Wallenstein 2009: 12). The power of architecture is intimately interwoven with the social, as critiques of modernist social housing have shown. For example, when the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St. Louis was demolished in 1972, its failure was positioned as one of architectural design. But Katharine Bristol shows that these claims of failure were complicit only in constructing a “Pruitt-Igoe myth.” She writes, “By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems. Simultaneously it legitimates the architecture profession by implying that deeply embedded social problems are caused, and therefore solved, by architectural design” (Bristol 1991: 163). Following this logic, then, the architect cannot contain or control the social. Michel Foucault, in conversation with anthropologist Paul Rabinow, articulated the relations between architecture and freedom by noting, “Liberty is a practice . . . none of these projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself ” (Rabinow 1984: 245). The relations between space and social life must be considered through a critical practice that continues to address shifting contextual, structural, and intersectional concerns. But the nature of the relations between the construction of a floating social reality and the production of solid material structures is not easy to understand. Nadir Z. Lahiji (2016) argues in Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Practice? that architecture today may often be posited primarily as the physical and instrumental practice of neoliberal politics. Yet the limits of social and spatial relations are not defined in a corporate boardroom or through a cynical politics of “freedom from” the welfare state, and they do not exist in a state of inertia. As geographer Doreen Massey contends in Space, Place, and Gender, “Space” is created out of the vast intricacies, the incredible complexities, of the interlocking and the non-interlocking, and the networks of relations at every scale from local to global. What makes a particular view of these social relations specifically

Nor are relations between social conditions and space as obvious as they might seem at first glance. Like Lahiji and Massey, we consider that architecture has a dialectical and evolving relationship of intricate complexity with the social and that, as such, the revolutionary potential of space is a key theme for architectural research to explore in inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative contexts. Among the many paramount contributions that explore this multifaceted relation historically, we may still emphasize the grand legacy of French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. In La production de l’espace (1974; translated into English as The Production of Space in 1991), Lefebvre proffers the following seminal argument: “(social) space is a (social) product” (Lefebvre 1991: 26).2 This statement—along with Lefebvre’s work and that of other French social scientists working on social housing, including his lesser-known associate Henri Raymond, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe (for more, see Haffner 2013), and Michel de Certeau—had a far-reaching, groundbreaking influence on thinking about the power of architecture and the built environment.3 Society remakes architecture, as architecture remakes society, ad infinitum. Lefebvre regards architecture as a mode of imagination, countering the negative reading of architectural historian and radical theoretician Manfredo Tafuri ([1973] 1976). Following the lead of these historical figures, who understood the central role of architecture as a medium for emancipation and social change, a central argument of this volume is that architecture is much more than a mere “container” for the social. The material products of architecture are here regarded as mediating structures that must be constantly redefined, reconsidered, and rethought as part of an iterative process. Today, new reasons and anxieties demand that we “rethink the social” in architecture, as we also rethink the architectural in the social. Such acts have a novel and indispensable purpose: to answer critical calls in a time of great political, economic, and cultural upheaval. In the murky waters of climate change, nativism, misogyny, war, xenophobia, cyberattacks, and neofascism, we desperately need new frameworks. Here, we call for 2. “L’espace (social) est un produit (social).” (Lefebvre 1974: 35). 3. On Raymond, see Gromark and Paadam 2018, in vol. #2(2), After Effects.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

spatial is their simultaneity. It is a simultaneity, also, which has extension and configuration. But simultaneity is absolutely not stasis. Seeing space as a moment in the intersection of configured social relations (rather than as an absolute dimension) means that it cannot be seen as static. (Massey 1994: 265)

021

a new beginning to address the body politic, where a variety of morbid symptoms are appearing in the form of Brexit, Donald Trump, the Le Pens, and Geert Wilders, among others. These are viruses bred by economic crises and spread through austerity by elites who expand military spending but defund cultural programs with the argument, “Can we really continue to ask a coal miner in West Virginia or a single mom in Detroit to pay for these programs?”4 We are witnesses to the death of the old politics of left and right, which are both distinctly unable to offer progressive perspectives on how to regroup and reshape the social for a new world. That we could modify capitalism toward equality and social justice appears now to be a utopian ideal. We seek new means of revolution to break out of the existing mythologies of “growth.” This book represents the culmination of an intensive period of collaboration and research that has specifically addressed the study of architecture and the social in Sweden and the power relations that intersection entails. From 2011 to 2016, the Swedish Research Council Formas provided funding for the national research collective called “Architecture in Effect,” thereby establishing a “strong research environment.” This allowed disparate researchers, designers, and students from across the four Swedish schools of architecture to develop a framework and institutional body for interaction and produced opportunities for research at a variety of levels and in various formats. The “social in architecture” has been, since then, rethought through the exchange, debate, and critical reviews this research milieu established as it wove a fabric of collaboration among otherwise autonomous institutions and individuals. This itself is a social act. The Methodological Approach—Critical Interpretations

The title of the research environment, “Architecture in Effect,” indicates the determination within the team to further our understanding of the variety of effects and conditional changes architecture promotes along social, spatial, cultural, political, and economic lines. Researchers participating in the environment drew upon theories and methodologies that are connected to a broad understanding of critical theory in its intersection with architectural research, such as critical hermeneutics, discourse analysis, gender theory, actor-network theory, qualitative biographical interpretative methods, and performativity theory (Rendell et al. 2007; Farías and Bender 2009; Ewing et al. 2010; Sykes 2010; Groat and Wang 2013; Rose 2016).5 4. The White House budget director Mick Mulvaney made this statement to justify cutting funding to public broadcasting during an interview on MSNBC in March 2017.

5. Theories and methods developed within the research environment are the focus of the companion volume, After Effects.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

In the contributions included here, four methodological perspectives are represented, enabling the production of critical interpretations and articulations of the built environment. These are historiographical, investigating contexts situated mainly in the past; case-based, investigating situations and contexts in the past or present; projective, investigating and creating, through urban architectural projects, opportunities for the future; and, generally, the unfolding of conceptual frames. Buildings are considered both as material works and as social artifacts in operation. A shared concern has been to sharpen existing tools and to develop new ones that allow us to identify and examine architectural, planning, and design agencies on personal, material, and institutional levels. The innovations of the resulting approach constitute the interdisciplinary methodological profile of our common findings. We position the architectural profession as a “making” discipline to promote design-based knowledge production. Addressing interpretation in and of architectural design is essential if we are to gain a deeper understanding of the ethical aspects of working as an architect and how such professionals influence culture, society, and politics. Interpretation is broadly understood here in terms of critical hermeneutics, as a reflexive mode by which critical positions are articulated to promote enhanced understandings of architecture in its wider cultural and sociopolitical context. Interpretations are thus directed not only toward critical studies of buildings. As architecture is assessed and evaluated and its alternatives are imagined, interpretation becomes a key part of the design process. The character and form that specific buildings take may be textual, figurative, spatial, or material. The interpretative act ultimately requires a commitment. The methodologies represented in this book mostly share a commitment to approaching architecture from many fields at the same time, and they represent our ambition to involve innovative qualitative tools tailored to the topics in focus. Besides their shared devotion to reconceptualizing how we study the social in architecture, an additional attitude unites them all: the act of interpretation inherent in all humanistic enquiries and particularly in architectural thinking (Snodgrass and Coyne 2005). Critical interpretation of the processes of making is a central focus of this work, and we address it from a dual perspective. On the one hand, we develop theories and methodologies for empirically well-grounded interpretations of the social meaning— overtly uttered or involuntarily hidden—ascribed to architecture, as seen from the perspective of the people who actually use or create physical spaces. These studies concern situations in time and space, constituted by specific material structures and the embodiment of symbolic meanings, related to a social subject, including the subjective positions of individuals or collectives who appear, use, and alter these spaces, as well as professional designers who create and change them from an official perspective. On the other hand, the studies included also explore new methodologies for such interpretations of social and cultural conditions and their relationship to the built environment. These include assessments of transformative demographic, economic, and

023

ecological trends, some of which may be conceived as critical discontinuities. Others are posited as distinct and clearly identified events in contemporary architectural history and its official historiographies. (These methods are interrogated in the sister volume, After Effects.) Ultimately, acts of interpretation also mean—in a more profound, critical sense—a scientific ambition to unfold and to reveal the virtual and potential cultural demands and desires that are not yet actualized or articulated in the form of material architectural space. The research in this publication therefore looks not only backward but forward. It adopts a speculative position, looking for possible alternatives from which the practice of architecture could benefit. In this sense, we are inspired by the sentiments of architect Jean Nouvel, who contends that the architectural project can at best be perceived as a perfect answer to questions and desires never raised: Unforeseen encounters are serendipitous in time and space, extending beyond any mere “logical” result of a given brief or program (Baudrillard and Nouvel [2000] 2005). The profession of the architect is indeed a profession of making. Architects realize aspirations, dreams, and desires through technical, practical, and structural responses to everyday needs. But architecture is equally a profession of interpretation. The making of architecture requires a projective practice and professional intuitive interpretation of individual and collective pretentions, aspirations, and performances.6 In this volume, with a focus on architecture, we approach research, an integral part of any academic profession, as research into both the prevailing and emerging cultural and social conditions of each architectural project. The articles in the present volume are critical explorations of how architects’ basic proficiencies and distinct professional skills are used and challenged as they encounter creative makers and users of the built environment. What evolves are new configurations of material space, new symbolic fields of operations, renewed ideas of the commons and the public sphere, and even new subjectivities that these spaces make possible. Ultimately, we argue for a new architectural citizenship that demands the virtual transformation, symbolic transgression, and repositioning of collective identities into renewed serendipitous experiences of reality as moments of intensified presence in divergent life worlds—a new common, and new commons. This reinvention crystallizes in material culture as it voyages toward new spiritual and collaborative states of mind, taking active and supportive part in processes of revolutionary social and cultural change. 6. On projective practice, see Somol and Whiting 2002.

The symbolic transgression of a social frontier has a liberatory effect in its own right because it enacts the unthinkable. But it is itself possible, and symbolically effective, instead of being simply rejected as a scandal which resounds on its author, only if certain objective conditions are fulfilled. In order for an utterance of action . . . aimed at challenging the objective structures to have some chance of being recognized as legitimate . . . and to be seen as exemplary, the structures that are contested must themselves be in a state of uncertainty and crisis that favors uncertainty about them and an awakening of critical consciousness of their arbitrariness and fragility. (Bourdieu [1997] 2006: 236). Today, architecture and social life are both in “a state of uncertainty,” particularly in the context of new challenges from a world where neoliberalism’s destructive power has clearly eclipsed its productive claims. Uncertainty allows new collectives to seep through the “cracks,” as musician Leonard Cohen wrote, “where the light gets in.” As we proceed, we recognize that the many fissures in our contemporary material reality are also the spaces for the new states of mind and new collective futures that we pursue in the research and practice presented here. 7. For the initiation of architectural rethinking, see Leach 1997.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Tafuri once argued that there is no radical architecture per se, only constantly reiterated critical acts or interpretations of existing and perceived material reality, of material culture. We, however, do see the potential for architecture to remake social relations, where architecture produces acts of profound rethinking.7 When Rabinow asks Foucault whether architecture can solve social problems, Foucault replies, “I think that it can and does produce positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom” (Rabinow 1984: 246). As a point of departure, we see that architecture can produce positive social change and arenas of participation for new and old members of the public, but it can also limit possibilities for marginal groups or for individuals at specific times of day or in certain seasons, and beyond. Architecture is never a neutral agent of change. It can represent the grounds for empowerment but equally for outright and devastating denigration in critical processes of symbolic recognition or in acts of symbolic violence, as Pierre Bourdieu underlines:

025

The Research Strategy: Primarily an Intradisciplinary Endeavor

Interdisciplinary collaboration represents a hallmark of contemporary architectural research. Usually, this is posited as developing relationships among established disciplines and creating opportunities for transdisciplinary research that extend even beyond academia itself, moving toward collaborations with people who live, love, and work in urban settings and with businesses or institutional partners such as regional or municipal governments. This applies equally to the team behind Architecture in Effect, where the notion of projective practice has played an important role. The primary mission for the project, however, was to renew and reinforce a relevant research agenda for architecture based on critical historiographic foundations and using innovative theoretical and methodological approaches. In this sense, the endeavor is primarily intradisciplinary. The focus on architecture itself has enabled the diffuse academic identity of architectural research and scholarship to reconstitute itself as a singular focus. The researchers and PhD candidates involved have been charged with enabling the discipline to confront architectural design constructively and convincingly to address many of the urgent challenges of contemporary societies. The collective has also strengthened architectural research from the outside, enabling researchers to engage with other academic disciplines on equal terms and with mutual respect. As editors who were also involved authors and partners, we hope this double book project will prove to be a powerful means of outreach and serve as a blueprint for an ongoing, unfolding research process that clarifies the vital potential contributions of architecture as a discipline that is making the future. The activities in the research project circled four major themes and fields of enquiry: “Critical Historiography,” “Architects in Formation,” “Critical Projections,” and “Material Conditions.” After its official start in February 2013 with the Rethinking the Social: Research Symposium in Umeå, February 6–8, 2013, at the UMA School of Architecture (for more, see Grillner et al. 2013), the project evolved around a series of seminars and limited conferences dedicated primarily to these four fields of investigation, each led by a theme leader. The contents of this book and its sister volume developed from these events and were crystallized from these original fields of inquiry.8 8. For the full thematic presentations of the four topics, see volume #2(2), After Effects.

Section and Chapter Characterization: For an Architecture of Exploration

The chapters in the book are organized in three main sections: “The Welfare State and Beyond”, “Toward New Subjectivities,” and “Urban Architectural Explorations of the Social.”10 The titles largely represent distinct steps or phases of scientific exploration in architecture: from reconsiderations of the recent past to the analysis of today’s complex subjectivities as realized in built form to projects that specifically reconfigure contemporary societies. Section One—The Welfare State and Beyond . . .

The Swedish welfare state is a widely acknowledged achievement of the long years of Social Democratic rule from 1936 to 1976; it created livable residential conditions for the majority of the national population. This feat remains a fundamental reference point for rethinking the social in architecture in general—and in relation to the ever-urgent housing question in particular. The shortage of housing in contemporary Sweden is accelerating, as it did in the early 1930s. The rate of construction of new units was the same in 2016 as it was at the beginning of Miljonprogrammet (the Million Program) half a century earlier. As the chapters here point out, however, the stigma that now attaches to the program has been used to underpin a widespread, radical critique of these suburban, speedily constructed, welfare-state projects. Over this lofty achievement hangs more than one dark cloud. Negative assessments were at their zenith at the crucial turning point of the early postmodern era, and they concentrated specifically during the eventful year of 1976 in Sweden as well as elsewhere. By adding the word Beyond to the title of this section, we also signal our intent to raise our gaze and widen our perspectives far beyond the classic welfare-state society. Here, we identify new models of welfare and new collectivities that could be created through radical, innovative, yet sustainable architectural inventions. As we enter into an amodern historic phase of persistent turmoil and uncertainty, the active creation of renewed and viable utopias, along with future visions of social resilience, becomes ever more essential as a countermeasure to challenge the image of Retrotopia (Bauman 2017).11 In the passage from solid to liquid, as Bauman describes modernity, “We are living in the interregnum of what is no longer and what is not yet” (Bauman and Mauro 2016: 172). Or, as he noticed almost a decade before, “At least in the ‘developed’ part of the planet, a few seminal and closely connected departures have happened, or are happening currently, that create a new 9. We first heard the quotation during the keynote address by professor Laura Lee celebrating the launch of ResArc, the research school of the Lund School of Architecture, on February 8, 2012.

10. The research program built on two earlier publications by members of the team. See Gromark and Nilsson 2006; and Anstey, Grillner, and Hughes 2007. 11. On the concept of the amodern, see Gromark 2000a.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

What Science Explains and Art Expresses; Architecture Explores. (Lee 2011)9

027

and indeed unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, raising a series of challenges never before encountered” (Bauman 2007: 1). These are the ideas and challenges that set the stage for what we present in this section and the questions it raises, which we hope will spur further investigations by members of this collective and others yet to be formed. Christina Pech sets the scene for a major transformative act and decisive turning point in contemporary Swedish architectural thinking: from the revered, classical modernist era toward an emerging profound requestioning in postmodern terms. This change of scene is exposed in the salient story of a traveling exhibition that was produced in 1976, titled The Breakthrough and Crisis of Functionalism: Swedish Housing 1930–80 (now commonly shortened to Breakthrough and Crisis). This collaboration between the authoritative voices of the national professional journal Arkitektur and the Swedish Museum of Architecture opened the curtains on a dramatic reappraisal of major modernist heroes while also providing a critical reorientation toward the new and unknown territories of postmodernism. Helena Mattsson continues along this historiographical track, introducing questions of gender and feminism into the discussion. She notes that the postmodern movement was predominantly dictated by male voices. Because the reception of postmodernism in Sweden was generally considered conservative and regressive, focusing on aesthetic expressions that ultimately generated a pomophobia and general moral indignation, she underscores the social and cultural changes of attitude among design professionals. These changes also resulted in the emergence of a more radical antimodern political position. In her thorough and revealing account of the singularity of the Swedish situation in an international context during the years around 1980, she points to a specific project, the Vårby Gård Church, built in 1975, which clearly reveals this crucial transformation by architectural means. Catharina Gabrielsson builds further on this theme to develop a critical historiographic analysis of a project that has served as a specific source of inspiration for architects because it is a cornerstone of postmodernism: the anthroposophical settlement in Järna, south of Stockholm, designed by Danish architect Erik Asmussen. Gabrielsson connects the settlement to emerging questions about capitalism and the complicities of architecture. Tijana Stevanovi extends the discussion of postmodernism into another cultural context and political environment with a piece dedicated to the architect Miloš R. Perović and the New Belgrade project developed during the mid-1980s in Yugoslavia. The chapter confronts the ambiguity between subjective authorship on a grand urban scale (which extends down to the level of individual building detail) and an elaborate scientific argument about design rationality and reasoning. The architect in this case applied a traditional modernist planning ideology to support a postmodern resurrection of traditional urban components. Erik Sigge investigates the philosophical roots of extreme architectural structuralism as an important aspect of Swedish modernism in the early 1960s, when the National Board of Public Building promoted principles of rational construction and standardization to provide economic and technical benefits for society. As Sigge notes, this was both an ideological and a bureaucratic project.

contemporary feature, the superficial “green washing” of buildings. She bases her analysis on interviews with key individuals involved in a project designed to make excessive consumption more socially acceptable and politically palatable. By adding a green park on top of an extravagant shopping center, those involved in the development process won credit for their supposedly profound environmental awareness. Ebba Högström addresses the pertinent issue of how to assess critically the healing effects of hospital architecture design through a visit to a recently constructed but publicly contested psychiatric clinic. She presents it as an example of contemporary welfare construction: a project with good intentions but questionable execution. Her on-site observations and critical interpretations reveal how dubious design ambitions might affect particularly vulnerable psychiatric patients. Fredrik Torisson concludes the first section with a discussion of utopianism, outlining a plea for an architecture that opens up the future instead of closing it down. He considers how to eliminate history itself in favor of a state of eternal existence beyond time: a motionless and never-changing space. This last chapter stimulates reflections on Bauman’s (2017) recent notion of Retrotopia. In his contribution to challenging ways of social thinking upended by the uncertainties of an era of liquid modernity (Bauman 2007), a period when the perception of an accelerating experience of the flow of time is the very focus, he argues: What prompts so many commentators to speak of the “end of history”, of postmodernity, “second modernity” and “surmodernity,” or otherwise to articulate the intuition of radical change in the arrangements of human cohabitation and in social conditions under which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its “natural limit.” Power can move with the speed of the electronic signal. (Bauman 2000: 10) Section Two—Toward New Subjectivities

The phrase “new subjectivities” indicates our recognition of the liquid character and mosaic structure of the myriad cultures of contemporary societies. In these contexts, little can be taken for granted, and surprises are common. Here, the range of potential spatial identities is as wide as the urge to craft a distinctive personhood as macro- and microtransformations accelerate. This triggers a deeper need for malleability over a longer period. Architectural thinking and design in an age of such uncertainties must incorporate these subjective and diverse perceptions and visions of the world. They are the new realities, and they demand dynamic aesthetic models rather than static concepts of beauty. These are the worlds in which architecture is conceived in terms of performativity and flexibility rather than merely as a site for specific social subjects. The age of uncertainties also suggests that architectural

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Maria Hellström Reimer introduces a critical angle of observation to a specific

029

research must now include as makers of the built environment those who were previously seen only as “users” (see Mack 2013; 2014; 2017). Architects act to construct changeable atmospheres that are open to a multitude of interpretations, even as they may coalesce around identifiable design visions. They also design for clients who may bring visions of the future and building typologies from other locales that reshape notions of the local or the domestic. New projects may be projections about the future, reinforcements of shared visions of the world by many members of society, or material presentations of a subaltern selfhood in which one can be both part of a collective and distinctively separate from it. Helen Runting and Hélène Frichot present a critical inquiry into the formation of a subject and of subject-environment relations: in this case, the “indebted woman” confronted with the seductive power of real estate and the illusion of autonomy in relation to the exterior urban world. The authors outline a feminist real-estate theory based on direct observation of the hot Stockholm property market as they try to identify the outlines of a creative and critical weapon of resistance. Katja Grillner presents findings from research on the transformation and gentrification of Rosenlund Park, an area in central Stockholm. Laying out preliminary facts and developing narratives of power and resistance, framed epistemologically through Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges,” Rosi Braidotti’s “nomadic subject,” and Graham-Gibson’s feminist “project of belonging,” the study discloses competing notions of what is perceived to be at stake. What specific values are described as “under threat” or “about to be developed”? On what grounds, and in whose interests, are arguments put forward? Katrin Paadam and Sten Gromark share insights collected from encounters and interviews with inhabitants of a Parisian housing block, recognizing that the diverse life worlds from the inside of a building have largely been kept silent even if overtly and transparently exposed to the urban surroundings. Paadam and Gromark aim to make these voices fully audible by placing them in the context of a drastic, ambiguous, and virtual metamorphosis after the implementation of a massive, innovative renovation project. They analyze the conversion from a perspective of stigmatization, enclosure, and longtime neglect, but also as a singular situation of residents’ symbolic transgression. Thordis Arrhenius considers how to handle the legacy of the modernist era when confronted with demands for both moderate alteration and experimental preservation. She crafts her arguments around a close study of the case of Fittja, a Million Program suburb to the south of Stockholm. In a related piece, Erik Stenberg offers a story of the adaptation and reconstruction of the remains of welfare-state urbanism in Sweden. He looks at how buildings in that milieu are reconfigured to address new demands, desires, and household configurations. Changes since the 1960s and 1970s illustrate how the industrialized groceries for which the cabinets of Million Program apartments were designed have given way to other kinds of food, how preparation must often address the needs of large families, and how residents may prepare meals that contain more influences from Somalia than from Dalarna.

Section Three—Urban Architectural Explorations of the Social

The distinctiveness of architectural research depends on the ambition to encourage the implementation of its findings: this material realization in the real world may be seen as critical projection. Architectural research, like that in the natural sciences, tries to explain a form of practice. Like visual art, though, it also tries to find forms of expression. This duality makes architectural research particularly inclined to explore as a significant part of its professional as well as its disciplinary identity. In contemporary discourse, research can be said to be making effects. Arguing for an architecture of exploration in a transdisciplinary context—beyond academia—on the basis of interdisciplinary collaborations and intradisciplinary consolidations is a radical way of producing knowledge about societies. Such an orientation challenges the established perceptions and boundaries of the academic community at large. It promotes an action-oriented profile for the profession, as indicated by a recent publication edited by Murray Fraser (2013) outlining the singularity of design research in architecture.12 Shaun Murray notes in Fraser’s volume: The integrative, projective nature of design research has enormous potential to facilitate complex transdisciplinary engagements that are increasingly necessary to solve many of the challenges we face in the world today. In order to contribute to these challenges, design research in architecture needs to offer a much clearer account of what it has to offer. (Murray 2013: 97)

12. For related publications on the topic, see Gibbons et al. 1994; Gibbons and Scott 2001; Nilsson 2004; Gromark 2000b; Hensel and Nilsson 2016; Gromark 2009; and Fraser 2013.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Also addressing the influence of immigration on the Swedish built environment, Jennifer Mack plays with the genre of the guidebook to develop new perspectives on which major buildings should be considered the “best of ” Stockholm’s architecture. She focuses on houses of worship developed for Muslim and minority Christian groups (typically with refugee backgrounds) to explore different scales of reference for quality and equality. The buildings are all presented with a distinct ironic touch to address questions of power in the selection of cultural artifacts, the agency of minority religious and ethnic groups in remaking Swedish space, and how certain buildings become part of the official map of a city (or why they are omitted). Ragnhild Claesson concludes the section with an analysis of how a museum should handle divergent visions of what constitutes practical spatial city planning. She asks what principles should guide a preservationist approach when everyday realities confront, imbricate, and overlap one another.

031

Alberto Altés Arlandis works in this strategic mode and offers insights into a

revealing story about a series of constructed situations. Labeling these intraventions, he illustrates attempts to introduce material projections into a social and public sphere in the form of exercises. They signify the conflicts embedded in this pedagogical yet reallife environment. In their contribution, Meike Schalk, Apolonija Šušterši, and Gunnar Sandin investigate two important and challenging contemporary public urban situations: one in Berlin and the other in Singapore. They consider these cases as acts and processes of critical participation, where (as part of local, spontaneously organized social movements), citizens resist official planning methods by applying a myriad of methods and tools. Gunnar Sandin then carries out a revealing investigation into the development of an inner-city residential project, as observed from a wider, longitudinal time frame. He analyzes the transformation of the project through the meticulous, step-by-step planning and reconfiguration of the public realm, all under the semblance of a dubious and fraudulent form of “user participation.” With an interpretive observational approach, Katja Hogenboom then investigates the public performance of the Seattle Central Library. She focuses on a theoretical understanding of the ideas of “public” and “theatricality” and investigates how an idea of publicness is enacted through the micropolitics of the architectural organization of elements, materials, and colors in the library. Fran Cottell and Marianne Mueller, artist and architect respectively, offer an account of cross-disciplinary collaboration. They present the results of three performance installations that were intended as spatial, explorative experiments testing social frictions in the domestic sphere, the institutional context, and the public square. They argue that the art world is far more ready to engage in such endeavors than is architecture. Luis Berríos-Negrón, in an essay extensively supported by graphics, uses the glass house as an emblematic building type to explore contemporary challenges such as climate change. His method of visual argumentation makes use of a multitude of historic and scientific angles. As a postscript, Roemer van Toorn writes about the crisis of complexity occasioned by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of a homogeneous world, a highly complex order full of revolutionary conservatism, and how within this “society of the And” a new beginning of the social can be thought. The travelogue of And-images that accompanies the article is meant to produce a cognitive experience in readers, inviting them to experience the theoretical point in a certain way, one that surprises and illuminates through affect and reason. Acknowledgments

The contents of Architecture in Effect Vol #1(2): Rethinking the Social in Architecture—Making Effects, in conjunction with its sister volume, Architecture in Effect Vol #2(2): After Effects—

13. For more on ResArc, see http://resarc.se/. For more on AiM and AiE, see http://architectureinthemaking. se/ and http://architectureineffect.se/. 14. Stefano Boeri, editor of Abitare, architect, professor of urban design at the Politecnico di Milano, and visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design; Keller Easterling, architect and professor of architecture at Yale School of Architecture; Dana Cuff, architect, professor of architecture, and director of cityLAB at the University of California, Los Angeles; Hilde

Heynen, professor of architectural theory at Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven; Doina Petrescu, architect, professor of architecture at the University of Sheffield, and director of Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris; Jane Rendell, architect, professor of architecture and art, and director of architectural research at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; and Eyal Weizman, architect, director of the Research Centre for Architecture, Goldsmiths, and founding member of Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, Israel/Palestine.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Theories and Methodologies for Architectural Research, mirror and sum up the enquiries and results of scientific research and practice that evolved from a recently concluded, tripartite scholarly initiative funded by the Swedish government as a so-called strong research environment. This environment, active from 2011 to 2017, combined joint efforts and crosscollaborations among Sweden’s four schools of architecture (in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Lund, and Umeå) and several affiliated university partners. The project was initiated as a joint effort by the leadership of the schools and received support and substantial funding from the Swedish Research Council Formas. The project also included a national research training school for doctoral candidates, ResArc, and two focused research collaborations: Architecture in the Making (AiM), hosted by Chalmers in Gothenburg; and Architecture in Effect (AiE), hosted by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The latter is sponsoring the publication of this double volume.13 Together, AiM, AiE, and the ResArc PhD training school assembled approximately one hundred researchers from all four schools of architecture in Sweden, as well as from nine partner institutions from neighboring fields. Interdisciplinary core groups consisted of thirty to forty researchers of different nationalities in the disciplines of architecture and urban planning, art, design, landscape design, community planning, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. The “environments” jointly engaged a team of seven international advisors based at American and European universities.14 The contributions to volume #1(2) represent reflections and fragments of research orientations and a wide range of applied methodological approaches. Even so, they congeal around the ambition to use a critical and social interpretative perspective when studying urban architectural projects, even encompassing the designers and users involved in their creation and remaking. We have consciously chosen to include a broad spectrum of academic voices: from PhD candidates to postdoctoral researchers to more experienced researchers in the middle of their academic careers to well-established scholars and professors. The chapter contributions vary from shorter pieces to standard, full-length essays to visual argumentations or project presentations of various sizes, representing diverse ways of studying the built environment. Our common focus is on making effects—on the potential effects of making architecture— as situated in cultural and social conditions. In the beginning, Architecture in Effect was intended to examine critically the role and the agency of architecture in its cultural and

033

sociopolitical context (e.g., professional roles and related education as well as power relations within and of architecture). As the contents of the double volume demonstrate, however, the research engages current global challenges such as economic, environmental, and sociopolitical crises, ecological and social sustainability, immigrant integration, gender equality, welfare, and healthcare. The research environment has already made significant contributions to the development of new theories and methodologies for critical interpretations and articulations of the role and significance of architecture in society. It has also achieved its primary objective: to provide a platform for intradisciplinary research consolidated in the various components of the project. This has strengthened and clarified the academic profile and consistency of architectural research within Swedish academia at large. The Architecture in Effect team acknowledges above all the grant support from Formas that allowed the present publication to emerge as one of the main results of this multiyear, multifaceted, multilayered research endeavor. Among many other creative effects upon our mode of working within architectural research, this funding made possible our collaboration across schools and universities in four cities and beyond. We also acknowledge the unique opportunity we had to develop a fruitful academic and professional collaboration across traditional academic boundaries and on many levels. This endeavor speaks through the research and investigations included here, and it will remain valid for the foreseeable future. We rethink the social in architecture as a framework with the potential to enact and evoke long-term transformative effects on the built environment—and on its study.

References Anstey, T., K. Grillner, and R. Hughes, eds. 2007. Architecture and Authorship. London: Black Dog Publishing. Baudrillard, J., and J. Nouvel. (2000) 2005. The Singular Objects of Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. 2007. Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bauman, Z. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bauman, Z., and E. Mauro. 2016. Babel. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1997) 2006. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Bristol, K. G. 1991. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.” Journal of Architectural Education 44 (3): 163–71.

Deamer, P. 2016. “Architecture/Agency/Emancipation.” In Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left, ed. N. Z. Lahiji, 106–22. London: Zero Books. Ewing, S., J. M. McGowan, C. Speed, and V. C. Bernie, eds. 2010. Architecture and Field/Work. London: Routledge. Fainstein, S. 2010. The Just City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Farías, I., and T. Bender, eds. 2009. Urban Assemblages: How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge. Fraser, M., ed. 2013. Design Research in Architecture: An Overview. London: Ashgate. Gibbons, M., C. Limoges, H. Nowotny, S. Schwartzman, P. Scott, and M. Trow. 1994. The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies. London: SAGE Publications.

Lefebvre, H. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. 2014. Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment: Introduction by Łukasz Stanek. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mack, J. 2013. “New Swedes in the New Town.” In Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture, ed. K. Cupers, 129–45. New York: Routledge. Mack, J. 2014. “Urban Design from Below: Immigration and the Spatial Practice of Urbanism.” Public Culture 26 (1): 153–85. Mack, J. 2017. The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massey, D. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. New York: Polity Press. Murray, S. 2013. “Design Research: Translating Theory into Practice.” In Design Research in Architecture: An Overview, ed. M. Fraser, 95–116. London: Ashgate. Nilsson, F. 2004. “Transdisciplinarity and Architectural Design—On Knowledge Production through the Practice of Architecture.” In Discussing Transdisciplinarity: Making Professions and the New Mode of Knowledge Production, edited by H. DuninWoyseth and L. M. Nielsen, 30-46. Oslo: AHO The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Rabinow, P., ed. 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Rendell, J., J. Hill, M. Fraser, and M. Dorrian, eds. 2007. Critical Architecture. London: Routledge. Rose, G. 2016. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. 4th Ed. London: SAGE Publications. Snodgrass, A., and R. Coyne. 2005. Interpretation in Architecture: Design as a Way of Thinking. London: Routledge. Somol, R., and S. Whiting. 2002. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism.” Perspecta: The Yale Architectural Journal, no. 33: 75. Sykes, A. K., ed. 2010. Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Tafuri, M. (1973) 1976. Architecture and Utopia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally published as Progetto e utopia. Bari: Laterza, 1973. Wallenstein, S. 2009. Bio-politics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editors’ Introduction_ Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn

Gibbons, M., and P. Scott. 2001. Re-thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge, UK: Policy Press. Grillner, K., S. Gromark, M. Kärrholm, H. Mattsson, E. Sigge, R. v. Toorn, and S. Lundgren, eds. 2013. The Reader: Symposium Reader for the Symposium “Rethinking the Social in Architecture.” Umeå School of Architecture February 6–8, 2013. KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment: Stockholm. Groat, L., and D. Wang. 2013. Architectural Research Methods. 2nd ed. New York: John Wiley. Gromark, S. 2000a. Amodern arkitektur: Arkitektur som kulturbespegling i osäkerhetens tidevarv. Stockholm: Arkitektur förlag AB. Gromark, S. 2000b. “The Singularity of Architectural Research.” In Research by Design Conference Book, eds. A. Nieuwenhuis and M. van Ouwerkerk. Delft: Faculty of Architecture, Delft University of Technology. Gromark, S. 2009. “Mellan profession och akademi: Reflektioner kring arkitekturforskningens egenart.” FORMakademisk 2 (1): 3–16. Gromark, S., and F. Nilsson, eds. 2006. Utforskande arkitektur: Situationer i nutida arkitektur. Stockholm: Axl Books. Gromark, S., and K. Paadam. 2017. “Henri Raymond 1966: Voices of Residents— An Analytical Method: The Primacy of Residential Quality in Urban Creation.” In Architecture in Effect Vol #2(2): After Effects— Theories and Methodologies of Architectural Research, edited by H. Frichot, G. Sandin, and B. Schwalm. Barcelona and New York: Actar. Haffner, J. 2013. The View from Above: The Science of Social Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hensel, M. U., and F. Nilsson, eds. 2016. The Changing Shape of Practice: Integrating Research and Design in Architecture. London: Routledge. Lahiji, N. Z., ed. 2016. Can Architecture Be an Emancipatory Project? Dialogues on Architecture and the Left. London: Zero Books. Leach, N., ed. 1997. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. Lee, L. 2011. An Integrated Design Strategy for South Australia: Building the Future. Adelaide: Government of South Australia. Lefebvre, H. 1974. La production de l’espace. Paris: Éditions Anthropos.

035

The Welfare State and Beyond... Upstate New York. Photo: Rossana Bartoli Fox

037

Rethinking the Social in Architecture: Making Effects. Editorsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Introduction

The Museum and the Magazine: Notes on the Historiography of Swedish Modern Architecture Christina Pech

The Museum

Although a well-established field internationally, the historiography of architecture has been paid comparatively little scholarly attention in Sweden. Architect, critic, and historian Claes Caldenby, also a longtime associate and former editor in chief of

The Museum and the Magazine: Notes on the Historiography of Swedish Modern Architecture_ Christina Pech

1976, a turning point? The question forms a headline in Léa-Catherine Szacka’s survey of the Europa-America exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1976. The exhibition centered on the work of twenty-seven leading architects and what the curator Vittorio Gregotti characterized as “issues that the modernist tradition had left to the generation following that of the Masters” (Gregotti 2010: n.p.). An accompanying conference on the state of architectural culture mixed the established voices with emerging professionals and a significant general audience. According to Szacka, the Europa-America project made obvious a rift in modern architecture that played out in the differences between the imaginary and the real—or, more precisely, between architects adopting a more poetic approach and those wishing to act as practical mediators of collective needs. “What was put on display,” Szacka concludes, “was the advent of a discursive turn in architecture, toward a unified critique but a heterogeneous approach” (Szacka 2014: 112). This article examines aspects of the historiography of Swedish modern architecture, and here, too, the year 1976 emerges with some urgency. Not only did 1976 mark the tangible end of forty years of Social Democratic rule, a symptomatic if not unforegrounded ending of what has become known as the era of the welfare state, but the mid-1970s—or even 1976? (Pech 2011)—also saw the arrival of a unified critique that nevertheless harbored a wide array of approaches and interpretations in the study of architecture’s recent past in Sweden. The article focuses on the activities of two main actors in the historiography of Swedish modern architecture: a museum, the Swedish Museum of Architecture; and a magazine, Arkitektur, the Swedish review of architecture. The study takes as its starting point a major exhibition on modern housing produced by the museum in 1976 and an editorial effort launched by the magazine in 1979 to publish so-called monograph issues. The ambition is to trace arguments in operation at an early and formative stage in the process of writing history, a task that is all the more relevant as the narratives put forward during this period still pervade Swedish discussions of architecture, both in scholarly and more popular contexts.

039

Arkitektur, has, together with art and architectural historian Anders Åman (1935–2008), been the main advocate of a historiography of the field. A 2016 special issue (vol. 85, no. 1) of Konsthistorisk tidskrift ( Journal of art history) is dedicated to the subject, but the main outline remains an article written by Caldenby more than a decade earlier (Caldenby 2004). In it, he mentions the Swedish Museum of Architecture only once, most likely because his study does not concern the institutional framework of the writings he does mention. On closer inspection, however, the museum is directly or indirectly involved in many of the publications he mentions and emerges as central to any study on modern architecture in Sweden. The museum was founded by the Swedish Architects’ Association (Svenska arkitekters riksförbund, SAR) in 1962 and operated as an autonomous foundation primarily financed by the Swedish state. From its outset in the 1930s, the association, as Caldenby (ibid.) also points out, actively took part in the dissemination of Swedish modern architecture through the publication of a series of books. Often written in parallel languages, the ambition was to reach a wider audience both within and beyond the country’s borders.1 With the arrival of the museum, which was largely motivated by the association’s growing possessions of deposits and donations from Swedish architects, the older material was rarely brought to light, and the recent past began to be addressed in a new way. With the Museum of Finnish Architecture (est. 1956) as its model, the Swedish Museum of Architecture constituted an exceptionally early example of a museum primarily dedicated to twentieth-century architecture. In effect, the advent of the museum spurred a shift from the mere keeping of deposits and promotion of Swedish architecture, to a more analytical and scrutinizing approach. From the beginning, the museum thus functioned as a beacon of critical debate.2 The Breakthrough and Crisis of Functionalism

When, in September 1976, the Swedish Museum of Architecture opened its exhibition Aufbruch und Krise des Funktionalismus: Bauen und Wohnen in Schweden 1930–1980 [The breakthrough and crisis of functionalism: Swedish housing 1930–80; hereafter referred to as Breakthrough and Crisis] at the Neue Sammlung in Munich, it did so against the backdrop of the museum’s early critical operations. At the time, the exhibition was the largest ever produced by the museum, and it would later travel to several cities in West 1. See, for example, Ny svensk arkitektur / New Swedish Architecture (1939), Trettiotalets byggnadskonst i Sverige: Från akademiska opponenter till oakademisk arkitektur (1943), Fyrtiotalets svenska bostad / Swedish Housing of the ’Forties (1950), and Ny arkitektur i Sverige: 1950-talets svenska byggnadskonst / New Architecture in Sweden: A Decade of Swedish Building (1961). For more, see Caldenby 2004.

2. The critical approach and exhibition strategies of the museum’s early exhibition were analyzed by Thordis Arrhenius in her research project “Medierad arkitektur—utställningen som diskursivt fält.” The results were presented at The Historiography of Swedish Architecture symposium at the University of Uppsala in October 2013.

3. Breakthrough and Crisis was produced by the Swedish Museum of Architecture, but the initiative came from West Germany and emanated from an interest in the relationship between Sweden and Germany in the early years of modern architecture. Funding was mainly secured by the Swedish Institute, a state agency promoting bilateral cultural exchange.

4. The slide projections were based on photographer Jens S. Jensen’s book Hammarkullen, (Helsingborg: Fyra förläggare, 1974).

The Museum and the Magazine: Notes on the Historiography of Swedish Modern Architecture_ Christina Pech

Germany, followed by Innsbruck, Budapest, and Moscow, before being revised for a Swedish audience as part of the fiftieth anniversary of the Stockholm exhibition at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 1980.3 A visit to Breakthrough and Crisis began in a spacious, brightly lit space portraying architecture and society in the 1930s. Now-iconic photographs from the 1930 Stockholm exhibition were displayed alongside a few models, furniture, and other objects from or contemporary with the earlier exhibition. Texts were sparse and poetic. In the same space, images of architectural projects from the 1930s were juxtaposed in a collage technique with images and graphic material (advertisements, prints, etc.) from everyday Swedish life in the 1930s. The collages were mounted on aluminum screens to allow visitors to mirror themselves in the background. This initial bright, airy space was followed by a small, dark screening room, an ostensible “crash-landing” into the 1970s, as Bengt O. H. Johansson wrote in a January 22, 1974, letter to architect Bernt Nyberg and historian Olle Svedberg (ARKM F2:139). An audiovisual experience—so-called multivision—signed by photographer Jens S. Jensen transferred visitors to the Gothenburg suburb of Hammarkullen, one of the heavily criticized municipalities built within the framework of the Million Homes Program.4 On exiting, visitors again found themselves in a bright, spacious room, a more “neutral” ground with aerial photographs documenting housing projects in urban areas from the 1940s through the 1960s along the walls in what might most appropriately be characterized as a reading room with books and reports available for the further study of Swedish twentiethcentury architecture and planning. The last room—entitled “Epilogue”—was again a dark screening room featuring the poem “Stora grupper av människor” (Large groups of people) by the politically engaged poet Göran Sonnevi. His critical encounter with postwar civilization was transmitted from loudspeakers as images of pedestrian flows were projected onto the visitors entering the room. Visitors were thus not only led through a sequence of spaces with contrasting ambience and factual content—with no alternative route from which to choose—but were also introduced to a variety of media, including photographs, full-scale reconstructions of interiors, multimedia projections, collages, books, scientific reports, display cases, and soundscapes. Physically, the sequences were divided by curtains formed of plastic strips that the visitors had to push aside when entering the different spaces of the exhibition.

041

Images and layout of the 1976 exhibition Breakthrough and Crisis of Functionalism. Swedish Housing 1930-1980. Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design, Archive of exhibitions, F2:142

Bild 1. UtstĂ¤llningen invigdes i MĂźnchen i september 1976.

After Effects Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research Combining theories and methodologies drawn from diverse disciplinary terrains, the after effects of research presented in this volume are aimed at strengthening future thinking and practice in architecture. We challenge the traditional assumption that theory occupies a position that is detached from the production of architecture. Instead we assert that theory can operate reciprocally with methodology toward experimentation in both critical architectural discourse and projective modes of practice. At stake here are the emergent possibilities of new socio-political and ecological challenges and contexts, where ethical and material conditions must be tackled jointly.

Edited by Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm

After Effects Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research Edited by HĂŠlĂ¨ne Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm

Julien Nolin, 5th year, the Arctic, Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway (2014), photo: David A. Garcia, Julien Nolin

003

008

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research

Hélène Frichot and Gunnar Sandin

Critical Historiographies

022

Introduction

026

A Critical Historiography, Again: Sounds from a Mute History

038

052

074

094

Helena Mattsson

Building a Case of Architecture in Effect Catharina Gabrielsson

Henry Raymond 1966: Voices of Residents —An Analytical Method— The Primacy of Residential Quality in Urban Creation Sten Gromark and Katrin Paadam

Insomnia Viewing: Ecologies of Spatial Becoming-With Karin Reisinger

The Identitarian Episteme: The 1980s and the Status of Architectural History

Mark Jarzombek

Architects in Formation

113

Situating Architects in Formation

118

Social vs. Monumental: Contrasting Views of the Architectural Profession

128

Anders Bergström

Reconstructing a Collective Critical Fiction Acts of Pedagogical Stewardship

Brady Burroughs

144

Toward Invention in Architectural Education

161

Heteroglossary

207

Critical Projections

208

Introduction

David A. Garcia

Hélène Frichot and Bettina Schwalm

Meike Schalk

218

Implementing Design Characteristics of Utopian Thinking in Mechanisms of Worlding

Nel Janssens and Charlotte Geldof

236

Smooth Montage

252

On the Irrational Section Cut

272

Delaying the Image: Toward an Aesthetics of Encounter

Hannes Frykholm Miriam von Schantz and Hélène Frichot

Alberto Altés Arlandis

288

Triangulations, Tales and Theories from MYCKET’s Artistic Research Project the Club Scene

Katarina Bonnevier, Thérèse Kristiansson,

and Mariana Alves Silva (MYCKET)

300

Critical Inhabitation: Interruption and Performative Criticality

Sepideh Karami

312

Anticipation and Other Affective Productions: Theorizing the Architectural Project in Action

Helen Runting and Fredrik Torisson

321

Material Conditions

322

Introduction

326

Pubs, Pads, and Squats: Vernacular Spaces

338

346

360

Mattias Kärrholm

and the Historical Sensorium

Ben Highmore

Fictional Geographies of Aging: The Fluid Pavement and Other Stories on Growing Old in Newham

Sophie Handler

Working the Field: An Interdisciplinary Methodology for New Urban Research

Jennifer Mack

Territorographical Notations in Malmö and Amsterdam:

Some Notes on Nonhuman Actors Involved in the Production of Territorial Appropriations and Tactics

380

On Avoidance

Daniel Koch

400

Authors’ Biographies

Mattias Kärrholm and Jesper Magnusson

005

Architecture in Effect Colloquium 11-12 October 2012 at Chalmers Architecture, Gรถteborg, photo: Roemer van Toorn

007

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin Editors’ Introduction

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

Architectural research tends to be wildly transdisciplinary, traversing vast domains located well beyond its own conventional territories, subsequently bringing back to the discipline new discoveries in the shape of concepts, theories, and the assumptions implicit in imported methodologies. As a disciplinary framework, what characterizes architecture is a general lack of consistency, a set of contradictory approaches and conflicting ideas, deep divisions and even competitive grandstanding. Research paradigms stemming from a broad disciplinary range, including philosophy, literary and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, computer science, engineering sciences, aesthetics, and art, have been appropriated by architectural researchers in their attempts to highlight the role of architecture in its societal and geopolitical settings. This transdisciplinary searching makes architecture an experimental arena in which to conduct research, but also a dangerous one, as architectural researchers are always at risk of misappropriating the sources they have gleaned, stolen, borrowed, and brought back as souvenirs from their travels. As John Law suggests when he addresses the messy methods of social science research, perhaps we “need to rethink how far whatever it is we know travels and whether it makes sense at other locations” (Law 2004: 3). A pessimistic stance might lament that architectural research fails to lay out a common platform from which architecture can launch forth to play an important role in inter-, cross-, and transdisciplinary academic collaboration. A more constructive and optimistic approach might seek out the pleasures and benefits in the mess we make as we go, searching for what matters in architecture and what we can offer to those researchers who come to meet us on our own heterogeneous terrain. To make things even more complicated and messy, the architectural discipline is entangled with the architectural profession and what it means to practice and identify as an architect: what this has meant historically, what it means today, and what it might mean tomorrow for the formation of the architect. If architecture has held to any consistency as a form of institutionalized knowledge this has tended to focus on both popular and critical historiographical accounts of architectural objects (icons) and the creative subjects (idols) behind their conceptualization and realization. As a result, serious architectural research is perennially at risk of being overshadowed by the poster boys (the gender ascription is intentional)—the icons and idols of architecture—or else dismissed as not intellectual enough because it is too focused on

009

Jane Rendall in conversation, Rethinking the social in Architecture, Research Symposium, Architecture in Effect, 7 and 8 February 2013, UMA School of Architecture, Umeå University, photo: Tobias Westerlund

the practical and material questions of day-to-day practice and problem solving. This perceived weakness of the architectural discipline in the Swedish context was part of the motivating force behind the large grant from the Swedish Research Council Formas (2012–2017) that has bankrolled the publication of this double volume, which emerges from the hothouse construction of a “strong research environment” called “Architecture in Effect.” If architectural research (in the Swedish context) has been perceived as strong in social consciousness but lacking in discipline or in need of the development of adequate theories and methodologies, what we propose is to act from this presumed position of weakness and stubbornly argue that it is exactly in this weakness and lack of discipline that architecture is most tactically prepared to address the “general crisis” (Fraser 2014) (environmental, economic, social, ethical) in which we discover ourselves mired today. If this is also a crisis concerning the presumed exceptionalism of the human subject (Anthropos), amid what is now described under the auspices of the Anthropocene thesis (Turpin 2013), then the architect as privileged human actor, a ‘man’-made-environment agent par excellence, is likewise placed in a situation of uncertainty in a world undergoing radical change. Recent global challenges such as human-affected climate change, largescale migration, and the devastating impact of neoliberal capitalist economic dogma have forced traditional research paradigms into a state of introspection, if not desperate panic, followed by disciplinary regroupings and collaborations across new constellations. Two emerging constellations with which our work might be associated are the architectural humanities and the environmental humanities.1 With the rise of academic capitalism (Troiani 2018), a devotion to architecture increasingly becomes a matter of survival: Who will get the money, from whom, for what, and when? We must further ask: at what cost to work/life balance and ethical commitment (Rendell 2017). Architecture is a material fact embedded in societal value structures, which means it has a real, material impact on quality of life and a capacity to ameliorate constructed environmental conditions. We affirm, as such, that it plays a significant role in coping with global changes and challenges. Yet architectural research must doggedly continue to insist on its significant role in the reconditioning of epistemological and methodological frameworks. We assert that it is essential that architectural research connect to current global economic, ecological, and sociopolitical crises and conditions 1. See, for instance, the Architectural Humanities Research Association and the Environmental Humanities websites. http://www.ahra-architecture. org/ and http://environmentalhumanities.org/.

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

of sustainability, integration, gender equality, welfare, and care. We need to articulate theories and methodologies that recognize the threats, possibilities, and peculiarities of our contemporary moment while remaining aware of our past (mistakes and successes) and anticipating our uncertain futures, and we must attempt this from the points of view and “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988) of our discipline. We have insights to communicate that are peculiar to our discipline, we have something to say about the role of architecture in contemporary transformations of cultures, societies, and environments, and we certainly have our work cut out for us, as the collected intellectual labor in this volume demonstrates. Architectural theories are produced and disseminated across many sites, from theory anthologies and readers, to peer reviewed journals, to conferences, exhibitions, and events. Architecture in Effect has likewise facilitated the hosting of such events, where we have placed an emphasis on the plural expressions of theory in architecture and how theory formation is an open-ended and constructive project able to respond to contemporary problems. This is true both of After Effects and its sister volume, Rethinking the Social in Architecture, with its emphasis on architecture’s social and political responsibilities and obligations. Architectural theory has a long and illustrious history that extends back to the origins of the discipline, but to be of any use to actively engaged researchers it needs to provide us with concept-tools so we can grapple with contemporary concerns and matters of environmental care. All too often, theory as a practical art of thinking through a situation or a problem is cordoned off within programs of history that constrain the vibrant work of theory under a tamed history of ideas. At its most conservative, architectural theory is associated with the long view, commencing with an obligatory nod to Vitruvius, proceeding through Leon Battista Alberti, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, John Ruskin, Gottfried Semper, Le Corbusier (and so on and so forth), perhaps concluding with a provocative offering by Rem Koolhaas (Evers 2006). Such anthologies collect samples of key historical texts, which too often leave minority points of view (e.g., women) out of the picture. Or else, architectural theory is framed from a specific geopolitical point of view and historicized in chronological order as a formation emerging from the late 1960s, presenting a recapitulation of the internal arguments of a group of key actors (Hays 1998; Sykes 2010). Sometimes architectural theories are organized according to taxonomies that name tendencies—postmodernism, structuralism, deconstruction, contextualism, phenomenology, and feminism (Nesbitt 1996)—that traverse domains specific to the discipline as well as introducing influences from the outside. Other theory readers simply gather material from the outside for consideration, introducing tasty morsels of philosophical thought to theory-hungry architectural thinkers and doers (Leach 1997; Ballantyne 2005), perhaps with insufficient warnings about dangerous ideas and without enough in the way of instructions for use. While, according to some, architectural theory “used to be defined as nothing more than a set of rules established to guide the architect in the realisation of a design” (Lavin 1990),

011

we would argue that despite the regular occurrence of determined arguments against “critical theory” in architecture, guidance is also required with respect to critical thinking: how to frame an argument; how to analyze a project or problem; how to determine the criteria of judgment by which to assess a situation (Martin 2005); how to define, localize, and use a concept; and how, from time to time, to invent a concept that might be passed along as a tool for thinking-with one another amid a changeable milieu. In C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen’s The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory (2012), one of the more recent large-scale anthologies of architectural theory, the editors explain that architectural theory is internally conflicted: on the one hand, theory seeks to be an authorizing and legitimizing force in architecture; on the other hand, it seeks to operate as a tactical and disruptive critical practice that challenges the status quo of a discipline. The compendium’s editors draw attention to how theory used to connote “openness, participation, generosity and mobility” (12). We see benefits in exerting the authority of architectural theory and deploying its tactical capacities, but most of all we are concerned with maintaining an ethos of openness and participation. Where theory becomes too willfully opaque and autonomous, it also becomes exclusive. The line between dedicating time and intellectual labor to the construction and interpretation of a text that is difficult because it is grappling with difficult problems and ideas, and being led on a wild goose chase into the murky regions of “theory land,” is a fine line indeed. Well before the ambitious Sage collection arrived on the shelves of those still dedicated to architectural discourse and intelligent critique, an important collection emerged correcting an overemphasis on a traffic in ideas arriving from dominant players in the North American context. It was called Critical Architecture (Rendell et al. 2007). Offering a measured antidote to the “theory troubles” that plagued architecture from the 1990s through the turn of the millennium, Critical Architecture is also the inaugural book in the Critiques series, now comprising twelve volumes associated with an annual international conference. Swedish researchers have regularly contributed to this productive research domain by hosting Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) events in Lund (2013) and Stockholm (2016), and by editing a collection of chapters entitled Architecture and Feminisms (Frichot, Gabrielsson, and Runting 2018). The edited collections within the Critiques series are located within a new and important formation called the “architectural humanities,” which succeeds in capturing contemporary concerns and controversies, as well as venturing critical historiographical work. Critiques answers to the supposed crisis in architectural theory with a revived engagement in concepts, theories, and methodologies and by attempting to ameliorate divisions: to mediate perceived divisions between architectural theories and practices. This brings us to the issue of methods and methodologies, because in addition to working with architectural theories of diverse kinds we are engaged in how theories and methodologies operate concurrently, each informing the other.

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

In Feminism and Methodology, Sandra Harding (1987) offers a simple distinction between method and methodology. Where method is quite simply how we are doing what we are doing, or what our techniques for gathering and applying knowledge are, methodology outlines a theory of methods. Methodology, which can be taken as the logic or logos of method, follows the act as a mode of reflection, even critical reflection. Methodology allows us not only to assess and further formulate what we have achieved but to speculate on what we might hope to do in the future. Where the sciences generally expect to be able to transfer knowledge through the sharing of methodologies, which are applied as methods that can be repeated with similar experimental outcomes, architecture’s approach to methods is far less disciplined. Architecture is willful and inventive in its approach to method, hoping less for the same outcome each time an experiment is attempted than for novel discoveries and “happy accidents,” at least during a design exercise (less so when it comes to materials testing). In some ways architecture can be seen to operate “against method,” where method is constrained by “naive and simple-minded rules” (Feyerabend 1993: 9). As Paul Feyerabend points out, an overweening method and an inflexibility regarding rules risks not only suppressing one’s sense of humor but can result in the drying up of the imagination, an inability to draw on intuition, and a use of language that is no longer one’s own but is composed of platitudes and standard academic tropes (ibid.: 11–12). Likewise, writers such as John Law (2004) and Tim Ingold (2013) suggest that the methods we use may not have to be methodical but may rather be messy and explorative. We tend to agree with Law, who insists that a method is not “a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality” (Law 2004: 143), because no reality is sufficiently stable to be given as such. Instead, method is performative, which means it takes place and develops in direct contact with an emergent situation. This is not to say we cannot learn from our past successes and mistakes, which methodologies and theories assist us to record and critically interrogate. After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research forges connections between concepts, theories, and methodologies in contemporary architectural research emerging within and beyond the Swedish architectural research environment Architecture in Effect. From the peripheral situation of the Nordics, and the Swedish context in particular, we present twenty chapters in four sections. Our aim is to challenge the habitual assumption that theories occupy a detached position from the production of architectural culture to assert instead that in addition to critical analysis, and even post-justification, theories can be seen to operate reciprocally with methodologies toward the production of both architectural discourse and critical modes of practice. The title of this collection, After Effects, is a play on the title of the research domain from which this project emerges, Architecture in Effect. The emphasis of this research environment is on an architecture that is neither exhausted by a discussion of icons and idols nor devoted to a constructionist development of architecture’s

013

technologies but asserts the powerful impact of architecture upon the social, cultural, political, and ethical factors of our contemporary contexts. These collected essays offer a complement to our companion volume, Rethinking the Social in Architecture. Dividing After Effects in two is a “heteroglossary” (Haraway 1991). The heteroglossary operates as a productive interruption, and in alphabetical order it concisely defines key concepts used throughout both After Effects and Rethinking the Social in Architecture. The idea of a heteroglossary is drawn from philosopher of science Donna Haraway’s discussion of the cyborg as a critical fiction and assumes that key terms quite often need to be defined in contradictory or conflicting ways. As such, it makes space for diverse or “different” (hetero) definitions of concepts to sit alongside one another. The (hetero)glossary, we propose, operates as a useful lexicon, suggesting obvious benefits for researchers, ranging from emerging scholars to established academics and practitioners. The activities within our research environment have been organized around four fields of enquiry entitled “Critical Historiography,” “Architects in Formation,” “Critical Projections,” and “Material Conditions.” These areas have been examined in the context of a series of seminars involving Swedish and international researchers, many of whom have now contributed chapters to this book. “Critical Historiography” examines the role of history in architecture and the operative relations between architectural history, education, research, and design practice. In the contemporary global culture industry the role of architecture has taken on significantly new forms. To understand these new terrains, we need to rethink the role of architectural history. What is the relevance of history and theory in design production? What role does it play in architectural education? These questions underline the importance of taking a critical view upon the application of historical knowledge in practice. The built environment is to a large extent constructed using history. Likewise, the identity of the profession is created through collective memories, discourse formation, and a traffic in ideas. As a fundamental force in processes of creating ideology, politics, and identity, history needs to be continually interrogated and reformulated. Helena Mattsson opens this first part of the book with a section introduction and chapter contribution in which she develops questions concerning critical historiography in the Swedish context. Catharina Gabrielsson presents the architecture of deregulation and discusses the architectural implications of the changing formation of the Swedish Welfare State, based on research she has undertaken with Mattsson. Sten Gromark and Katrin Paadan uses historical case studies to approach critical historiography, discussing research associated with the residential architecture of late-1960s France. Karin Reisinger introduces the use of feminist political ecologies as a way of rethinking historiographical practices. Her case studies tackle mining development in the north of Sweden and the associated relocation of towns and communities. The section closes with an essay by Mark Jarzombek, from whom the concept of critical historiography

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

has been appropriated (see Jarzombek 1999). Jarzombek undertakes a critique of the emergence of “global history” in architectural historiographical scholarship since the 1980s, demonstrating how a seemingly innocuous term such as tradition suggests a sensitive critical point in terms of how architectural histories are branded, disseminated, and formed in relation to extradisciplinary forces. “Architects in Formation” examines the roles of architectural education and connected research cultures in the formation of the architect, combining historical, pedagogical, and epistemological perspectives. Architectural education plays an important part in socializing the professional architect, which means that a student’s future professional practice is likely to be heavily influenced by the ways in which they have been enculturated at architecture school. Despite the proliferation of architectural research since the 1960s, architectural knowledge is still grounded in design experience and cultural values transmitted during the critique sessions that take place in the early years of an architect’s training. Most traditional scholarly studies on architectural education have focused on the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the nineteenth century or on the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau during the 1920s. Critical studies of more contemporary educational models are needed. This section commences with an introduction, followed by a historical overview of architectural education by Anders Bergström, who coordinated this research theme in Architecture in Effect. To illustrate two distinct approaches to architectural pedagogies, we include a chapter by Brady Burroughs, who discusses acts of pedagogical stewardship with an emphasis on queer, camp, and feminist approaches to the design studio and seminar. David Garcia then places us in the context of extreme environments, suggesting that students of architecture will increasingly have to grapple with urgent environmental issues in innovative ways. “Critical Projections” examines the architectural project as an emancipatory practice, able to articulate, project, assess, and debate alternative architectural and social possibilities for the future. Architecture has always played a key role in utopian orientations, articulating the material conditions for an ideal society to take shape. Architects’ devotion to utopia has a long history that, especially in the wake of late modernism, has also been radically challenged, not least in relation to the lengthy, merely positive connotations of, for instance, “welfare state,” “structured plans,” or “sustainable housing.” The urban architectural project can be conceived, on the one hand, as a vital tool for future visions of potential social and architectural transgression and, on the other hand, for reflecting on the relations of power altered by a proposed intervention. This section is introduced by Meike Schalk, who offers a background on the critical project in architecture and discusses the postcritical versus projective debate that arose at the turn of the millennium in the American context. As an antidote to this tired debate, Schalk frames the conjunctive capacity of “critical projections,” and the chapters that follow explore the potential of this provocation to think critically in

015

relation to projective explorations. To demonstrate this position and extend the argument, the opening chapter by Nel Janssens and Charlotte Geldof discusses the role of utopian thinking in the emergence of moments of worlding. Shifting to the question of architectural representation, Hannes Frykholm projectively explores, at the same time as he critically interrogates, the implications of what he calls “smooth montage” in the rarefied space of the hotel foyer. Taking on an instructional tone, Hélène Frichot and the film theorist Miriam von Schantz introduce the critical potential of the “irrational section cut” as a drawing technique and how it can be situated as a feminist design power tool. Alberto Altés Arlandis continues the discussion of image making in architecture, speculating on how a critical architect might delay the images of architectural representation, slow their consumption so that an ethics of the encounter might emerge. Expanding this question of ethics and ethos, the art and architecture collective MYCKET (Mariana Alves, Katarina Bonnevier, and Thérèse Kristiansson) presents their feminist and queer approaches to creative practice in architecture and their emphasis on a feminist queer collective ethos. Sepideh Karami introduces her method of interruption as a mode of creative resistance, aiming to disrupt the status quo of architecture. The section concludes with a critical take on affect and the emphasis that architectural practice places on the project as privileged signifier with Helen Runting and Fredrik Torisson’s discussion of the powerful affect (that which arouses mood, feeling) of anticipation in the production of the architectural “project.” “Material Conditions” examines the contemporary significance of architecture as a material milieu in which diversely positioned human and nonhuman agents work in complex relations. Interest in matter, material, and materiality has been resurgent across philosophy, cultural studies, and the social sciences, and the brute question of architectonic materiality has been a perennial question and challenge for architects. New theories have enabled recalibrated definitions of matter and material relations that challenge the subservience of matter to form. Staking out different positions on this reorientation, domains such as (feminist) new materialism, nonrepresentational theory, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology all have something to say about objects, artifacts, and things and the conceptual framework of materialism. Furthermore, reformulated Marxist theories of historical materialism have persisted, remaining relevant today by offering ways to critically address the capital-driven contemporary conditions of urban environments and the means by which to continue to fight for a right to the city as a publically shared and governed resource. Following an introduction by Mattias Kärrholm, Ben Highmore opens this section inside the historical sensorium, venturing into the disappearing spaces of pubs and shared rental housing, expressing concern about the deflation of collective consciousness and social withdrawal. Here the material conditions have given way to a new orientation toward experience economies and structures of feeling that obscure the politics of class difference and reduce our imaginative resources. Sophie Handler

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

reminds us of the crucial question of aging populations in urban contexts and their material connections to stories and places. Jennifer Mack introduces ethnographic field research as a methodology that can be of great benefit to an architectural researcher attending to material field conditions. Mattias Kärrholm and Jesper Magnusson address material conditions from the specificity of two case-study sites in Malmö and Amsterdam. They understand territory as an event that takes place rather than as a stabilized, pregiven yet abstract space. Daniel Koch concludes the section by turning some persistent assumptions upside down, demonstrating that street vibrancy and a greater number of encounters among people in urban contexts should not always be considered inherent architectural goods. The relationship of society to urban space needs to be constructed with an understanding that strategies of avoidance also deserve exploration and safeguarding. We take the title of this research domain seriously in proposing to interrogate, in relation to regional and international tendencies in architectural discourse and practice, the “after effects” of the research that is developing in the Swedish context. An architectural “after effect” is that which is produced in the wake of architectural research, though this is not to place any special emphasis on temporal progression or causal relations; for instance, between concepts and built forms. Instead we draw attention to architectural “effects” in terms both general and allusive, as in “effects of building policies,” “effects of light,” or the more mundane “effects” left behind when a tenant vacates the premises. “Effects”—and “special effects,” in particular—are also suggestive of the near ubiquitous presence of affective atmospheres amid today’s experience economies; specifically, the curation of such environments where “after effects” can also allude to the role of postproduction as a means of manipulating previously prepared media, such as still or moving images. The role of affect, from the design of urban contexts to architectural representation, is a recurring motif across many of the collected chapters. After effects are also visual illusions, produced via cognitive anomalies, typical of the trompe l’oeil that architecture is apt to produce through various means of visualization. The physiological and behavioral side effects produced after the administration of an (architectural) pharmakon, whether curative or fatal, are likewise a question of the after effects or, more precisely, the side effects that architecture might produce. Furthermore, we use the title After Effects because this formulation offers an antidote to the compulsion to insert a post- in historical periodizations of architecture, such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postfeminism, and the postdigital. Instead an after effect prefers to create anachronistic conundrums, shifting temporal registers between retrospection and projection as it considers the paradox of histories of the near present or barely past. Finally, as a theoretical and methodological positioning, after effects call attention to a certain ethical demeanor; that is, how to follow the research materials we have before us, learning to acknowledge where we are, and understanding the situated knowledges that influence our actions.

017

The specifics of our locale and its constant negotiation with global forces, means that the questions we address to the status of architecture’s concepts, theories, and methodologies are framed and grounded from our position at the northern periphery of Europe. From the Global North we have witnessed the slow retreat of the welfare state and the rapid rise of neoliberal forms of governance alongside the logics of advanced capitalism. We have witnessed our borders closing with surprising swiftness in response to the increased volume of movement of refugees and migrants. We have witnessed acts of terror, close at hand and further afield, and we have seen how easily politics swings toward an extenuated nationalism and xenophobia. All the while we consume and produce in cycles of ever-more voracious and unabated fervor and feel comfortable in our position of privilege. On the other hand, Swedish research in architecture has a recognized social and political profile, and we are not doing so badly when it comes to raising consciousness about gender and equity in architecture (see Schalk, Kristiansson, and Mazé 2017), though we also need to maintain a tireless vigilance here. From the locality of our “matters of care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012), our questions are nevertheless globally relevant: When a concept, theory, or methodology is appropriated from elsewhere, how is it transformed within architecture in preparation for pertinent reapplication? What does architecture have to offer its outside in how it reformulates not only its own but its appropriated methodologies and theories? Architectural research tends to be multi-, cross-, and transdisciplinary, benefitting from ideas incorporated from other disciplines as well as providing materials and methods to those disciplines keen to learn from architecture. Architecture as knowledge and know-how is reciprocally produced with its outside. While attempting to hold together an eclectic array of concepts, theories, and methodologies drawn from diverse sources, architecture faces the ongoing challenge of maintaining consistency as a knowledge formation (in ongoing transformation), and arguing for its own distinct theories and methodologies. In part to resist the habit of leaping haplessly between the icons and idols of architecture, this book instead draws attention to the role that diverse and even contradictory modes and methods have in asking questions and framing pertinent problems that challenge the presumed “common sense” and normative tendencies of architecture.

Ballantyne, A. 2005. Architecture Theory: A Reader in Philosophy and Culture. London: Continuum. Evers, B. (2006). Architectural Theory: From the Renaissance to the Present. Cologne: Taschen. Feyerabend, P. 1993. Against Method. New York: Verso. Fraser, N. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review 86: 55–72. Frichot, H., C. Gabrielsson, and H. Runting, eds. 2017. Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies. London: Routledge. Greig Crysler, C., S. Cairns, and H. Heynen, eds. 2012. The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory. London: SAGE Publications. Haraway, D. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. Haraway, H. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. London: Free Association Book. Hays, K. M., ed. 1998. Architecture Theory since 1968. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Jarzombek, M. 1999. “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography.” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (4): 197–206. Lavin, S. 1990. “The Uses and the Abuses of Theory.” Progressive Architecture 71 (8): 113–14, 179. Law, J. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge. Leach, N. ed. 1997. Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. Martin, R. 2005. “Critical of What? Toward a Utopian Realism.” Harvard Design Magazine, no. 22: 1–5. Nesbitt, K. ed. 1996. Theorizing a New Agenda for Architectural Theory: An Anthology of

Architectural Theory 1965–1995. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2012. “Nothing Comes without Its World: Thinking with Care.” Sociological Review 60: 197–216. Rendell, J. 2016. “Giving an Account of Oneself: Architecturally.” Journal of Visual Culture 15 (3): 334–48. Rendell, J., J. Hill, M. Fraser, and M. Dorrian, eds. 2008. Critical Architecture. London: Routledge. Schalk, M., T. Kristiansson, and R. Mazé, eds. 2017. Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice. Baunach, Germany: AADR. Sykes, K. ed. 2010. Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural Theory 1993–2009. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Troiani, I. 2017. “Academic Capitalism.” In Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. H. Frichot, C. Gabrielsson, and H. Runting. London: Routledge. Turpin, E., ed. 2013. Architecture in the Anthropocene. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press.

After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research_ Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin

References

019

CRITICAL HISTORIOGRAPHIES

021

Introduction by Helena Mattsson In the contemporary global culture industry the role of architecture, as well as its history, has taken on new forms and meanings. Discourses around architecture—for example, “the history” of architecture— have been commoditized through the creation of globally mediated images. That history has been used in the production and marketing of architecture is not a new phenomenon, but new strategies emerge where. history writing and storytelling melt together into floating images of slogans in a controlled and designed “brandscape” (Klingman 2007). The artifacts, as well as the stories and images connected to them, create forces effecting and producing networks of power, politics, and money. To understand these new terrains created by the contemporary economic order, we need to understand and frame the role of architectural history and historiography through a critical lens. The status of history as an independent subject in schools of architecture is widely discussed and is being reassessed today, both in international and national contexts: How does history relate to practice? What is the relevance for history and theory in the production of architecture? This does not mean history is a neglected perspective in either teaching or practice. Rather the opposite: it is a frequently used source of information—too often, however, without a sufficiently developed theoretical approach. This draws attention to the importance of developing a critical view of the use and role of history, and history writing, in architectural education. In this context a critical historiography can help open new paths of inquiry that might lead beyond the tradition of architecture and the historiography of the Western world and enter into other disciplinary domains and cultural contexts. Consequently, critical historiography, by elaborating on the fundamental narratives of architectural theory and history, might open them to a wider scope of themes, such as its relations to the contemporary global economy, migrations, and local segregation, the construction and use of heritage, and other topics not yet considered. The built environment is to a large extent constructed by using history, and even the identity of the profession of architecture is Previous page: “The Venetian”, Las Vegas, US. Photo: Ramon Prat

Introduction_ Helena Mattsson

created through collective memories and historiography. Architectural history is a fundamental force, not only in the processes of creating ideology, politics, and identity but in the construction of material reality, which needs to be continuously uncovered. Rethinking Architectural Historiography (Arnold, Turan Özkaya, and Ergut 2008) argues that architectural history should not be considered as a subdivision of history. Instead, we should “put architecture in the driving seat” (ibid.: xvi) and claim it as a discipline in its own right. This would have a radical impact on the terms in which the past is studied, combining a wide range of source material with the archives as well as methods of interpretation. Considering architectural history a discipline also clarifies its relations to other disciplines—for example, to politics, economy, and geography— and facilitates transdisciplinary interpretations. The response to the word method is often a deep sigh and one should ask why methods (and theories) are important, but they are always present even though an author may choose not to acknowledge them. How to choose material, how to work with historical facts, how to create the archives—all are methods implicating theoretical perspectives that constitute the limits of possible knowledge. But method and theory are urgent today for other reasons. In Academic Capitalism and the New Economy (2004) Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades discuss how today’s institutional academic frameworks are governed by economic thinking that inscribes the researcher in a neoliberal agenda of money and funding. In the entrepreneurial university each researcher must act as a client in the marketplace, and formulations around method, theory, and source material have direct implications for a project’s feasibility and its ability to generate funding. “Historical culture” can be seen to belong more to a notion of “institutional war” than to training or representation because of how that culture is framed by money or power struggles (Cohen 2008). This is also the claim of The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, whose editors frame the institutional context of research as “worldly theory [that] is bound up with modes of production and dissemination” (Crysler, Cairns, and Heynen 2012: 6). The position that unconditionally constitutes the limits of what is possible to think

023

and to say should be understood both in relation to the institutional framework and in relation to the discipline of architecture. In his “Prolegomena to Critical Historiography,” Mark Jarzombek calls for a critical historiography “that is neither the handmaiden of a discipline nor an agent of the modernist call for the liberation of the Self” but instead fulfills its humanistic mission “only by taking up the uncomfortable position of an uninvited guest in its own house” (Jarzombek 1999: 203). Jarzombek’s article was written in response to a call for articles that Kazys Varnelis made for the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), a call that was itself a response to the crises of theory, history, and critical thinking at the end of the 1990s. Following a period in the 1980s and 1990s when theory gained a priority position in the discipline of architecture, influenced by postmodern discourses on gender, postcolonial identity, race, and class, the emergence of a “postcritical” discourse took form, largely inspired by the development of digital and computational architecture as well as conflicts in American discourse that positioned the East Coast against the West Coast. In his introduction to the May 1999 special issue of JAE, Varnelis (1999) stresses that when theory entered the discipline of architecture in the 1980s and 1990s some historians started to investigate the theory of history itself, deconstructing, analyzing, and critically surveying that theory even as the status of history itself was diminished. Both Jarzombek and Varnelis note the importance of relating a historical consciousness to the production of architecture and argue that a critical historiography is needed to reflect upon the discipline in a constructive sense. Historiography is consequently not perceived as something located outside what is often, in an inarticulate way, called the “practice of architecture,” as expressed through the design and production of material architecture. Unfortunately, the responses to Varnelis’s call were disappointing. Three articles, all from scholars associated with MIT’s program in history, theory, and criticism, were published (alongside Jarzombek’s contributions were articles by Sibel Bozdogan and Pani Pyla). Nevertheless, as Varnelis notes, the questions raised by the issue “suggest that investigations in critical historiography are essential for the continued development of architecture” (Varnelis 1999:196).

References Arnold, D., B. Turan Özkaya, and E. A. Ergut, eds. 2005. Rethinking Architectural Historiography. New York: Routledge. Cohen, S. 2008. “On the Body and Passion of History and Historiography.” Rethinking History 12 (4): 515–35. Crysler, G., S. Cairns, and H. Heynen, eds. 2012. The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory. London: SAGE. Jarzombek, M. 1999. “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography.” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (4): 197–206. Klingmann, A. 2007. Brandscape: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Slaughter, S., and G. Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Varnelis, K. 1999. “Critical Historiography and the End of History.” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (4): 195–96.

Introduction_ Helena Mattsson

Even today we lack sufficient inquiries into the historiography of the discipline framed by such emergent twenty-first-century themes as the postpolitical, the global culture industry, or the Anthropocene. This section of After Effects can be understood as a continuation of the discussion that started in 1999 and as a response to Varnelis’s suggestion “that the new calls for practice [should] be accompanied by new calls for the practice of critical historiography” (Varnelis 1999:196).

025

A Critical Historiography, Again: Sounds from a Mute History Helena Mattsson

Only a thought that does not conceal its own unsaid—but constantly takes it up and elaborates it—may eventually lay claim to originality. —Giorgio Agamben, The Signature of All Things: On Method

1. More than ten years ago, while working on Swedish historiography, I would open my lectures on the topic with an image showing my messy working table. Beside it hangs a note quoting Reyner Banham: “How did I get in this way?” (Banham 1960). In the article from which the quotation is taken, “History and Psychiatry,” Banham outlines a critical historiography: “History . . . is not like in Alan Colquhoun’s telling phrase about Giedion, ‘The quest for respectable grandfathers,’ but a psychiatric enquiry into the springs of action, the grounds for inhibition” (ibid: 331). When using the image of my desk with the quotation on the wall I wanted to point towards my personal role as a historian and display my own desire to investigate the history of architecture, noting that it was an uncertain and undetermined search for something not yet formulated; that the investigation of history was a process of making that had much to do with making architecture. But I also wanted to be open about my frustration reading historical accounts on Swedish architecture while at the same time being intrigued by questions related to history and historiography: its limited ability to incorporate certain histories, its inability to speak certain languages, and its sudden mute gaps. One concrete example of a historiographical silence is the absence of popular culture in the historiography of Swedish postwar architecture. Even though Sweden is deeply influenced by American culture, why is American pop culture left unthematized in Swedish architectural historiography? These limits, constraining what Swedish historiography can and cannot say, contain a history in themselves.

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

A critical historiography will always point back toward the historian, toward the writer herself. To unpack voices embedded in historical interpretation is also to make inquiries into the making of history. How is the historical inquiry set up, and what events, objects, and actors are displayed as historical facts? While questions related to the elements that build up a historiographical narrative are of importance here, equally or more important are the desires, frustrations, vindictiveness, joy, thirst for power, and so forth, that drive the author as historian in the creation of the historical scene.

027

Previous page image: Rethinking the social in Architecture, Research Symposium, Architecture in Effect, 7 and 8 February 2013, UMA School of Architecture, Umeå University, photo: Tobias Westerlund

Such histories—narratives of the obscure, the unseen, and the mute—are the subject of this brief reflection on architectural historiography. Inquiries into these voids and lacunae could lead the historian in many directions, involving architecture or not. The silences around American pop culture suggest something about the self-image of Swedish architects and historians and about Swedish architecture (built or unbuilt), reflecting what is absent in larger societal discussions. Consequently, these historiographical gaps could become a starting point for an analysis of the limits of language, even limits of thought, which goes far beyond the scope of architecture and opens another methodological theme: Where does architecture start and end; where is its limit? Today, this range of questions creates a field for critical reflections on historiography that I am still trying to uncover, dig through, and sort out. An unseen “nature of the past”—dirty, muddy, chaotic—continuously kept under control seems to frame all historical accounts. One of the crucial tasks for historiography is to order a lost past, even though this past is itself out of the historian’s control and has no logical development or structure. Ordering an unruly past is also valid for the past to come; that is, what is still in our future, so as to ensure we will reappear in a future ordering of the past (Edenheim 2011). Working with history is a slippery undertaking; it turns back on itself, collapses time, and continuously transforms its figures of study. The impossibility of ever being able to reach “history” is elaborated by many scholars. The theologian Franz Overbeck uses the concept of “prehistory” to discuss a split taking place in relation to all historical phenomena. Michel Foucault’s “historical a priori,” Marcel Mauss’s theory of Mana, Sigmund Freud’s split between the conscious and unconscious, and Enzo Melandri’s relation between historiography and actual history all draw attention to a rift between “history” and the unrevealed past (Agamben 2009). In addition, the insight that the historian is produced by the system she tries to break through in itself constructs a field of inquiry. Could we sneak out of our own history? For Marc Jarzombek the history we are all captured in is modernity. In his article “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography” from 1999, he asks, “How does one historicize the history of our discipline’s intellections now that these intellections have impacted the very history that will investigate them? How could we as interpreters slip beyond the limits of tradition?” Jarzombek argues that a critical historiography “will have to develop a multiperspectival critique of our subjectivized and disciplined modernity so as to provide (in the sense essayed by Foucault) the basis for a more cogent struggle against a discourse that has no visible center” (Jarzombek 1999: 202). The word critical here does not suggest an alternative to disciplinary historiography; rather, Jarzombek claims, it alludes to “the fundamental nature of history’s homelessness and diagrammatic incompletion” (ibid.), and therefore the critical aspect is possible only if historiography takes “the uncomfortable position of an uninvited guest in its own house” (ibid.: 203). The uninvited guests, the mute gaps, the disruptors, and the cracks are what promise to open new paths.

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

2. A triangulation of architecture, economy, and politics involves many agendas, and the understanding of this “architectural complex” rests to a large extent upon the position of the interpreter. This forces the historian to be aware of her position in a larger network where there are no clear borders between architecture, politics, and economics. As Peggy Deamer (2013) points out, theories of architectural autonomy have influenced thinking about architectural history, which could be one of the reasons architecture has not been sufficiently analyzed in relation to those crucial societal forces. Foucault (2001) uses the concept of “problematization” as an inquiry into “how and why certain things (behaviour, phenomena, processes) became a problem”—for example, “madness”—which then opened a space where the scientific discourse of psychiatry took form. Relating this to an architectural complex involving politics and economy allows architecture to be “problematized” from a wide range of positions and actors. In my own work Foucault’s idea of “problematization” helped me to find a method how to investigate the architectural housing code complex in the 1980s, involving discourses of deregulations, politics and economy. Through analyses of why and how norms appeared as a problem it became clear that the dominant conception of one ideologically grounded discourse on de-regulations in fact consisted of different lines of thoughts. When deconstructing the univocal master discourse emphasizing a political ideology of housing deregulations through inquiries into each discourse as separate “problematizations,” these differently situated discourses were revealed. This approach enables an understanding of the complexity and contingency of the situation, where different and sometimes even contrary incitements overlap, creating one coherent and seemingly univocal discourse on the surface. Another reason architecture has not been analyzed enough in relation to politics and economy could be that many architectural projects, especially if they have reached a certain degree of “bigness” and have been produced in a globalized economy, reveal complex networks of financiers, investors, and consultants. They are difficult to overview, and the question of where architecture starts and ends inevitably becomes crucial. More investigations bring more of an impossible mess to the surface, a societal knot lacking rational decision-making procedures, with incoherent design processes and no architecturaltheoretical agendas. Instead, what is to found are the tons of marketing brochures and images produced by the multitude of operators involved. Consequently, studies of architecture’s relation to economics and politics have implications for writing architectural history. To consider architecture as a network of things, protocols, decisions, and so on is also to take on perspectives not necessarily conditioned by the architect. Instead she becomes one agent among others in a network of interests, agendas, regulations, and power structures. To maneuver outside modernity and confront the conditions set by today’s global culture industry and capitalism, and then to maintain the position of the uninvited guest that Jarzombek calls for, requires its own historiographical standpoints and involves a large variation of methods and points of view to achieve the required critical distance.

029

3. To elaborate on the notion of a mute history could lead in many directions, and here I have space to bring up only a few. Some are related to the notion of historiographical limits and what is possible to express. Other aspects are directed toward methods; for instance, how to work with gaps and silences in relation to the archive and in relation to “historical facts.” Edward Carr asked What is history? in a seminar series of the same name at Cambridge University in 1961. Revisited today, most of his once provocative ideas now seem more-or-less commonsensical. Nevertheless, his ideas about historical fact bear a second look. Carr expresses his skepticism toward the empirical tradition of knowledge. Facts, according to empiricists, are understood as coming to the beholder from the outside. The process of perception is in this way conceived as passive. First, facts are received, and only then are they cultivated. The more facts we have, the closer we come to the truth. Carr questions this concept of historical facts by stressing that “all facts on the past are not historical facts” (Carr 1961: 4). A historical fact, according to Carr, is a chosen fact, what the historian has decided to identify as a historical fact. The emergence of this relativistic perspective anticipates the coming postmodernism and is to be found in several disciplines during the 1960s; for example, in art. In The Tradition of the New, Harold Rosenberg (1959) describes how driftwood is picked up, or chosen, to be art. The artist decides what is art: that a given piece of driftwood is art is not determined by anything immanent in the driftwood. In a similar way the historical fact is what the historian chooses among an indefinite number of past events. If the artist makes art, the historian makes history. Even though these ideas on “historical facts” do not sound as provocative today, we could turn to architectural historiography and ask whether the way we use historical facts is a conscious process in our work. The postmodern historian Hayden White (1973) developed a similar idea more than ten years after Carr and Rosenberg answered “no” to this question. White compares history writing with art, claiming that both disciplines are based on aesthetic and poetic choices that go beyond the rational. He argues that the moment a fact becomes historical is decided by an author’s narrative construction, which he calls “metahistory.” White develops a methodology to deconstruct and analyze metahistory as a historiographical condition, which points toward a postmodern critical historiography. The historical fact and the archive are tightly connected. The archive is often seen as the same as the historical fact. The archive can be understood as a precondition for historical inquiries; it is the material the narrative can be built upon—the stones required for the construction. But the archive can also be discussed as an active tool for writing history. Some years ago, Meike Schalk, Sara Brolund Carvalho, and I started the nonprofit organization Action Archive to make inquiries into “participatory history writing” and to construct “an active archive.” The archive must be constructed when working with historiography critically, and so we discovered an urgent need to develop adequate research methodologies. What are the benefits of establishing an organization such as this

4. If the immaterial infrastructure of historiography is of extensive importance, so is the physical space. The repressed stories not visible in the common historiography, the unsaid, are most often acted out in space, and the challenge is to find, or construct, the right spatial framing. Here I want to elaborate on three spatial situations framing historiography taking some work done by Action Archive as a starting point: first the spatial organization of the archive; second, the space of temporal interactions; and third, urban space as historiographical framing.

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

for undertaking historical surveys? One significant benefit is the affordances granted to official organizations when working with contemporary and critical historiography. When investigating the recent past of a suburban area outside Stockholm called Tensta (Schalk 2016), we were met by a massive silence, both literal (people not wanting to talk because of a conflictual situation) and figurative (material gaps in the official archives). We are currently in the process of making this mute history speak by activating the archive in witness seminars, interviews, exhibitions, films, and participatory mapping workshops. During our investigations we discovered many gaps in the official archives— covering documents describing the inhabitants’ life, health, living circumstances, and so on. Documents that should have been collected according to the law had disappeared during the archive’s many reorganizations that had taken place over the last thirty years in the suburbs. The fact that archival material is increasingly ephemeral makes it even more important for today’s historians to work with the recent past (Spohr Readman 2011). Many of the suburban areas we looked into (but especially Tensta) had been sites for testing new ideas and were suffering from too many, and too short “projects,” leading to reorganization when a project ended and another started, which resulted in material not being taken care of and histories not documented. This loss of documentation has an effect on the identity of a place even today because a site without an official history documented in the archives is often considered as being without a history. In this way the suburban history is reminiscent of the erased histories of colonialism and postcolonialism history. One of the first steps is thus to construct historical facts and make something exist. To form an official organization and to become registered in the records are actions against short-lived and ephemeral initiatives. Through collaboration with the Stockholm City Museum, Action Archive established links between our actions and the official city archive to create a robust historiographical infrastructure. In line with this thinking, we consider Action Archive to be writing a history of the present, not as a “history of the past in terms of the present” but as a “rewriting of the present through the past” (Foucault 1991: 31), something we also call “projective historiography.” Action Archive can also be understood as an experiment in starting venues outside the university to work with contemporary history and historiography, echoing Paul Rabinow’s call for adjacent platforms that are more flexible than the university’s disciplinary structure (Rabinow 2016).

031

When searching the records of Swedish 1980s architecture to study connections between the postmodern movement and major socioeconomic transformations, the importance of the feminist movement was clearly revealed through such ephemera as newspaper articles, flyers, and speeches. However, almost no research has been done on the topic, and historical records are not to be found in the established archives. Consequently, an archive had to be constructed. After learning that the Swedish Architecture and Design Centre in Stockholm had refused to accept material from the largest women’s organization for Swedish architecture, the Women’s Building Forum (Kvinnors Byggforum, KBF), we created a small but crucial archive with binders, photographs, and file folders. By coincidence, and underlining the connection between the postmodern movement and the feminist movement, the KBF archive ended up on my bookshelf just above the archival material of a leading architectural critic including canonical magazines forming the postmodern movement. Consequently, the spatial organization became a materialization of historiography: the need for another perspective, locally framed and based on another gender’s story. This led me to reflect on the importance of analyzing the physical conditions framing the archive, including the material organization, the size, the specific spaces used, and so forth. Inquiries into the spatial formation of the archive suggest ways of interpreting and reflecting upon the physical organization of information as a method of critical historiography. Another example of the importance of spatial framing, this one stressing temporal interactions (framed by space and time), occurred on the evening of March 7, 2015, the day before Women’s Day, at a small gallery in Stockholm. When speaking on the history of the Women’s Building Forum at an event the forum had arranged for its members, I became aware of how powerful and explosive history can be. The gallery space was filled with new members as well as the founders of the organization (spanning some thirty-five years of membership). The aim was to exhibit the group’s archival material in order to create a powerful historical consciousness by framing feministic architectural strategies being used in the organization’s history. This way of “acting out history” created unplanned connections over time, whereby central issues for the young LGBTQI generation of today overlapped with the struggles of the 1980s feminist movement. Several feminist scholars have discussed the value of theater, performances, and events in which history and the contemporary interact to create new understandings of both history and the present (Räthzel 2016; Withers 2015; Alexander 2005). Important here is that history, and the way one thinks with history, cannot be reduced to representation alone, but are instead productive. Social inquiries and participatory methods (like other methods) not only describe the world but enact it. This points toward “ontological politics”: If methods create worlds, then the question becomes, which worlds shall we create (Law and Urry 2004)? Even if many stories are embedded in other stories and come across as repressed or invisible, they are often played out as irrepressible leakages not immediately manifested.

5. Historiography has always had a contemporary character because the authors tended to be generals, clerics, reporters, and political commentators who wrote about their own lives and times. The most ancient example of a serious historian is often said to be the Athenian general Thucydides (ca. 460–400 BC), who documented events in his own life, notably the Peloponnesian War, to help future generations better understand their own time. Such history had a more projective character than we find in the discipline today. But when history was established as a discipline in the nineteenth century, it was important to react against traditional historiography and take a distance to contemporary events which is for example evident in the work of the 19th century historian Jacob Burckhartd. A contrary position was later claimed by the philosopher Benedetto Croce, who in 1917 pointed out that all history is contemporary history (Croce 1941). He was referring to contemporary history not as a history of the recent past but (similar to Thucydides) as that which begins in the moment an action is performed and is defined as the actual present. Croce describes contemporary history as that which “vibrates inside the historian’s mind” (ibid.: 19), a description emphasizing that history and the present are one. After Croce, the idea of a contemporary history and the close relation between the past, the future, and the present has been repeated with many variations. Where can a line be drawn between these temporalities? And how should the “historical” be framed? After the Second World War the study of the recent past became part of the academic milieu through the formation of the field labeled “contemporary history.” A branch of history practiced by institutes both outside academia—for example, the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich and Berlin—and within (e.g., the Institute of Contemporary British History at Kings College in London or the Institute of Contemporary

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

By shifting position to look from another perspective, listen to other voices, and investigate other spaces or scales, the investigator can grasp these otherwise invisible stories. To notice and interpret the acting out of history is an important method for digging into a mute history and revealing new historical facts. This acting out could happen on various scales. For example, a participatory mapping workshop—a method described by Action Archive—made clear that the dominant history of 1980s Stockholm had been focused on spatial areas significant for the economic boom. Other spaces that had not been in focus, such as the sleepy suburbs and hidden urban places with cheap rent, revealed another history (framed and dependent on architecture and physical space), one of antiracist organizations, countercultural groups, and environmentalists. These groups responded to developments in 1980s Swedish society, such as growing racism, violent neoliberalization and deregulation, growing class differences, and so forth. Action Archive’s mapping workshop made clear that the city and its spaces are crucial in the formation of social networks and that the city, like the archive, is a physical organization of information that can be interpreted and used in a critical historiography.

033

History at Södertörn University in Stockholm), “contemporary history” is often defined as the conceptualization and contextualization of history that is close to the present, or the creation of a historical horizon to contemporary trends and developments. Contemporary history expanded at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s when history was an extraordinary and urgent topic in the political and public debate. The Cold War era was ending, but the crimes of WWII were not yet too distant. Historiographical methods and traditional source materials were questioned, and oral history, enacted history, and witness seminars were developed as new methods. Today it is time to further develop the methods in relation to a global cultural industry and to the flows of contemporary capitalism. As Kristina Spohr Readman argues, new tools need to be found to write the world as it presents itself today through the production of transnational or global narratives of contemporary affairs. (Spohr Readman 2011: 508), and she introduces the concepts of “history of the present” and “‘new” contemporary history” referring to historians studying the actual, unfolding problems of today’s societies. She argues that contemporary historians need to engage in novel historico-methodological approaches that to a lesser degree will relate to the “everdiversifying source base” because of the greater ease of undertaking oral history and the possibilities afforded by the digital revolution. Instead, issues linked to moral obligations in the shaping of political culture and societal memory, cultural conditioning, and public functions become relevant. (ibid.: 528–29). When we complicate the relation between the past and the present, there are also implications for the relation between the role played by the historian versus the journalist and the critic because the different actors are likely to compete for the interpretative monopoly, which is very clear in today’s public debates on historical topics. A potentially more positive perspective is that the new situation offers new possibilities for individuals to move between the roles of the historian, the journalist, and the critic. This also actualizes methodologically interesting issues in relation to temporality; first, regarding the pace of inquiries (the often slower historical research versus the faster journalism/criticism); second, regarding the historical distance to the object of study, which will affect the interpretation and the way the object of research is conceptualized. The journalist or critic often investigates the present, while the historian works within a broader temporal framework.

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

6. Earlier I touched on the silence of written history, of “autonomous architecture,” of the suburban archives, of women and activist groups in the architectural historiography of the 1980s. I also laid out some possible methods for making this silence speak, including reflecting on where to find the mute history, the gaps, and the silences; taking the role of the “uninvited guest”; analyzing historical situations as “problematizations”; and more active methods such as creating historiographical infrastructures or acting out history through witness seminars, performative events, and participatory workshops. The discussion on techniques or methods can be continued by revisiting some passages from Giorgio Agamben’s The Signature of All Things: On Method. In his preface Agamben (2009) outlines three conditions for his understanding of method. First, he states that method is impossible to separate from its context: no method can be valid for every domain. The objects of inquiry always interact with the method itself, and therefore all methods are always deeply intertwined with the material being studied. This relation is also discussed by John Law and John Urry, who note how methods construct social worlds and are in themselves productive (Law and Urry 2004). This could also be applied to the relation between the author/historian and the field of investigation. For instance, what is the role of subjectivity in interpretations? Always there, it is often hidden behind veils of objectivity and rationality, and this relation might preferably be seen as a resource, as something to investigate further in order to understand more about the object of inquiry. Here, architectural historiography could learn much from anthropology’s use of self-reflexivity. Another methodological principle for Agamben is the genuine philosophical element in every work and its capacity to be developed. He sketches a method for investigation when he explains that he always searches for points in the material that are open for further elaboration and development. In relation to architectural historiography, this would lead us to a discussion not only of what kind of material to elaborate upon in research but how the interpretations undertaken are depicted. The challenge becomes to write a history that points toward silent spots without giving all of them a figure and a voice and instead leaving openings for further inquiries. Third, Agamben calls for “archeological vigilance.” Every inquiry in the human science “must retrace its own trajectory back to the point where something remains obscure and unthematized. Only a thought that does not conceal its own unsaid—but constantly takes it up and elaborates it—may eventually lay claim to originality” (Agamben 2009: 8) This principle might be the most challenging because it touches the limits of historiography and the impossibility of revealing and ordering the past. Agamben speaks of a prehistory. All historical phenomena can be split into prehistory and history, which are connected but not homogenous. Behind or parallel to the traditional history with its monuments and written archives, visible and touchable, lies a prehistory that is not structured by the logic of chronology. For Agamben, prehistory (what Foucault calls the “historical a priori”) is the history of “the moment of arising,” the moment when an object

035

comes into being. The object was already there, but at a certain moment it becomes articulated. This split between history and its prehistory comes close to Freud’s conception of the conscious and unconscious. The aim, however, is not to restore a previous stage but to go back to the split and to the conditions that gave rise to the rift. History and historiography are elusive. Something always slips through the readings, interpretations, and inquiries. When something is intellectually taking form, it suddenly transforms, and the “historical facts,” composed from seemingly inexhaustible source material, appear not to be what they were first thought to be. These rifts make up a history of their own that tempts the historian to set out along new tracks. This complex historiographical dilemma is tightly connected to a naive anticipation on the part of the historian that it might be possible finally to understand and order things. The desire to reveal, to uncover, and to understand the obscure drives the historian to take the next step, to dig even deeper into to the “archive” of memories and traces, and the more complex the web of inquiry gets, the closer to the end of the (written) story has the author reached.

Räthsel, N. 2016. “Feminist Education and Forum Theatre, a Collective Rehearsal for Reality.” In Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Activisms, Dialogues, Materialisms, Pedagogies and Projections, ed. T. Kristiansson, R. Mazé, and M. Schalk. Baunach, Germany: Spurbuchverlag. Rosenberg, H. 1959. Tradition of the New. New York: Horizon. Spohr Readman, K. 2011. “Contemporary History in Europe: From Mastering National Pasts to the Future of Writing the World.” Journal of Contemporary History 46 (3): 506–30. Schalk, M. 2016. “Old News from a Contact Zone.” In The Social (Re)production of Architecture, ed. D. Petrescu and K. Trogal. London: Routledge. White, H. V. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Withers, D. M. 2015. “Strategic affinities: Historiography and Epistemology in Contemporary Feminist Knowledge Politics.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 22 (2): 129–42.

A Critical Historiography Again: Sounds from a Mute History_ Helena Mattsson

References Agamben, G. 2009. The Signature of All Things: On Method. New York: Zone Books. Alexander, J. M. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Banham, R. 1960,. “History and Psychiatry” Architectural Review 127: 325-332 Burckhardt, J. 1963. Briefe, Vollständige und kritisch bearbeitete Ausgabe: Mit Benützung des Handschriften Nachlasses hergestellt von Max Burckhardt. Basel: Schwabe. Carr, E. H. 1961. What Is History? The George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge. London: Macmillan. Croce, B. 1941. History as the Story of Liberty. London: G. Allen and Unwin. Croce, B. 2012. Polemica sulla storia (a cura di A. Musci). Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura. Conati, N. 2015. “History as Contemporary History in the Thinking of Benedetto Croce.” Open Journal of Philosophy 5: 54–61. Deamer, P., ed. 2013. Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present. New York: Routledge. Edenheim, S. 2011. Anakronismer: Mot den historiska manin. Munkedal, Sweden: Glänta Produktion. Foucault, M. 1991. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. 2001. Fearless Speech. New York: Semiotext(e). Hollander, J. D. 2011. “Contemporary History and the Art of Self-Distancing.” History and Theory 50: 51–67. Jarzombek, M. 1999. “A Prolegomena to Critical Historiography.” Journal of Architectural Education 52 (4): 197–206. Law, J., and J. Urry. 2004. “Enacting the Social.” Economy and Society 33 (3): 390–410. Mattsson, H. 2017. “From Norm to Form.” In Rethinking the Social, ed. S. Gromark and J. Mack. Barcelona: Actar Publishers. Rabinow, P. 2016. “Paul M. Rabinow.” University of California, Berkeley. http://anthropology. berkeley.edu/people/paul-m-rabinow (accessed April 29, 2017).

037

Building a Case of Architecture in Effect Catharina Gabrielsson

The Architecture of Deregulation Some time ago, as a spin-off to our more extensive project of writing the history of Swedish postmodern architecture, we staged a seminar series at ABF Stockholm (the Swedish Worker’s Education Association) framed by the heading, “The breakthrough of the neoliberal city.”1 On three consecutive occasions, we asked a panel of scholars

Building a Case of Architecture in Effect_ Catharina Gabrielsson

Introduction Every research project hides questions too big to be articulated up front, questions perceived as nonacademic or unresearchable in addressing the axiomatic layer on which everything else is based. One such question concerns the capacity of architecture to intervene in the world, not merely to make manifest or support its dominant forces; the question of how architecture matters, and how we may know it matters, which requires an extensive amount of terminological groundwork even to be asked. Shortcutting that procedure, I would like to begin this essay where it ends; namely, by proposing affect as a conceptual device for investigating architecture’s role in processes of social change. Such an investigation would seek the architectural in what Kathleen Stewart calls “ordinary affect,” described as “the pressure points and banalities of everyday life, carried forth through impulses, sensations, expectations, daydreams, encounters, and habits of relating … that catch people up in something that feels as something” (Stewart 2007: 2). This “something” evokes the heterogeneous modalities of architecture—whether taken as object, project, or practice, in terms of discourse, modes of representation, or spatial sensations—at the level of immediate encounters, tied into the ever-changing relations between people and things. Addressing the world at the level of affect is to seek the leastmediated points of connection between coexisting bodies, living and inert, the immanent field of vitalities and influences that is their capacity to be affected and have an affect. Conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, following Baruch Spinoza, affect captures the essential relationality of human existence, responding to and transmitting in that flow of influences that is the social world. Proposing affect as a conceptual device for researching “architecture in effect” serves here at the opening as precisely that: an opening toward the foundational indeterminacy of architecture, in that we assume, but may never really know, the outcomes of practice. This essay is a preamble to the question of how architecture matters, rather than a response, viewed through the lens of historiography.

039

Previous page: “Staging the message. The Architecture of Communication” PhD course (ResArc), Swedish Research School in Architecture, run by Roemer van Toorn at the UMA School of Architecture, 2014

1. Helena Mattsson (project leader) and Catharina Gabrielsson, The Architecture of Deregulations: Postmodernism and Politics in European Building, 1975–1995, funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) 2012–2015.

to consider three distinct formations—the housing share (bostadsrätten),2 the plan motif (planmotivet), and the city festival (festen)—in diachronic tracings over time. What interested us with these phenomena was how they made an appearance in discourse during the 1980s and seemed to take on a new agency. As elements of social formation, they were embedded in the still prevalent ideology of the welfare state, but they gathered energy as an improvement to that project. Thus, the housing share was voiced as a step toward increasing the rights of housing occupants against the totalizing power of the municipal property owner; the plan motif—such as a tower block positioned to “crown” the square—was introduced in planning documents to regulate aesthetics in urban design (Mattsson 2016); the city festival was integral to the rediscovery of the historic inner city as a realm for social restoration. Yet in allowing for the privatization of the housing market and ensuing processes of gentrification, the erasure of local qualities through the insertion of high-rises—a defining mark of global corporate capitalism—and the aesthetization of public space interwoven with privatization and commercialization, these formations can be viewed as micro-machines for setting neoliberalism in motion, for making manifest a transformation of the collective political imagination, and for inducing a new biopolitical order at the level of everyday life. Slowly transforming the contents and values of institutions and inherited forms, gradually altering the grounds for a common conversation, ultimately situating us as researchers, incremental change and the factors by which it comes about are immensely difficult to pin down. Neoliberalism emerges ambiguously from within the welfare state. Scholars have stressed an understanding of neoliberalism as a project, driven by a belief that “market forces operate according to immutable laws no matter where they are unleashed” (Peck, Theodore, and Brenner 2009: 49). Evolving in interaction with local conditions marked by contingency, neoliberal restructuring forces operate as processes that are necessarily heterogeneous, albeit with similar outcomes and aims. Given the ambiguities and tensions of any historical moment, adding to the challenge of identifying the decisive actors and events, an understanding of neoliberalism as process calls for a multidimensional approach, something like a historical cartography. In this respect, the seminars at ABF had the benefit of creating the sensation that something had happened: something to do with content rather than form. Our presentation of material sourced from the mid-1980s—newspaper clippings, planning documents, architectural schemes, design competition jury verdicts, and so on—was an act of exposing the past onto the 2. The Swedish bostadsrätt (literally “the right to a dwelling”) is based on membership in a co-operative building society, affording occupational rights to a dwelling or apartment that, strictly speaking, constitutes a “share” of the property and not a private property in itself.

3. Both expressions are used in Maktutredningen (SOU 1990:44), a Swedish government report on “power and democracy under changing conditions.”

4. One such case is presented in ”Conjuring Spirits: Capitalism and the Anthroposophic Configuration of Swedish Postmodern Architecture”, my chapter in the sister volume of this publication, J. Mack, S. Gromark, and R. Van Toorn, eds., Re-Thinking the Social in Architecture.

Building a Case of Architecture in Effect_ Catharina Gabrielsson

surface of the present. It constituted a montage, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, a technique for capturing the past through a composition of fragments with the capacity to expose rather than explain. For Benjamin, the past can only ever emerge through the image where it “flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin [1968] 2007: 255). In terms of historiography, however, the affect of sensing the past must enter into dialogue with intellectual reason. It involves engaging with a terminology that might, or might not, correspond to findings on the ground. In making an account of “what happened” during these years, concepts and definitions readily operate as filters rather than lenses for perception. The aim of the project “The Architecture of Deregulations: Postmodernism and Politics in Swedish Building, 1975–1995” is to critically interrogate architecture’s role during the period known as “the end of the welfare state,” “the end of an epoch” marked by extensive structural transformations.3 Spanning executed buildings and design proposals, oppositional movements, exhibitions and important debates, the project is based on cases, allowing for investigations of architectural modalities in their coeval socioeconomic settings.4 While the selection of cases necessarily relies on concepts and theories, this very “preknowing” carries the threat of overcoding and ultimately determining the findings. The notion of the “aesthetic turn” associated with postmodern architecture, for instance, characterized by attention to form and symbolic value, reverence of the past, strategies of irony, and “double coding”—ostensibly combining to mark a withdrawal from a more direct social engagement—has the effect of obscuring the context of this “turn,” separating aesthetics from politics. Explicitly seeking such connections is to go beyond the issue of how architecture adjusts, responds to, and materializes changes in matters such as jurisdiction, industry, new public management, planning procedures, or housing politics. Instead, it is to ask whether architecture also contributes to, transmits, and provokes the change in sensibilities that somehow make these transformations possible. Conceptualizing architecture as a discursive practice, directed toward buildings in their multidimensional capacity to “structure and condition rather than simply frame human action” (Weizman 2014: 17), the basic tenets of the project are that postmodern architecture, much like the functionalism/modernism that went before, holds a reciprocal relationship to society; that architecture, even where reduced to style, has the capacity to manifest, strengthen, and even forebode an ideological shift.

041

Before or after Capitalism? But how do you build a case for such arguments? How do you prove, for instance, that the new ideas on housing and domestic space that followed the crisis of modernism in the 1970s connect to the financial and juridical changes that will turn the housing share into an object of private investment and precarious debt? On what grounds can you claim that the revitalization of the historic inner city, the “discovery” of public space, and the “recovered” urban aesthetics in the 1980s constituted means for individualization, commodification, and neoliberal segregation? How are these seemingly arbitrary phenomena linked—or are they? If these questions seem overtly conspiratorial and even mad in their blunt causality, consider that linking postmodernism to capitalism is standard procedure, although usually the order is reversed. For Fredric Jameson, postmodern architecture is the cultural expression of late capitalism, to which it holds a “virtually unmediated relationship” (Jameson [1991] 1997: 240). The term expression resonates with a Marxist logic of base and superstructure, where material conditions (the means and forms of economic production) constitute the base for every other aspect of society, such as politics, religion, and culture. Jameson foregrounds a new “hybrid” spatiality generated by reorganizations in capital, tied into technology and globalization—a postmodern “hyperspace” that in suppressing distance in both time and space submerges the subject in the immediate present without “sheltering layers and intervening mediations” (Jameson [1988] 2012: 470–71). Defining postmodernism as a “cultural dominant” rather than a specific style, Jameson makes allowances for the contradictions and differences in how postmodernism appears in various cultural fields. But this also serves to further underline his view on postmodern architecture as the outcome of capitalism. Yet, architecture announces the postmodern condition, and here I am not talking about the claims made by Charles Jencks (whose Language of Postmodern Architecture was published 1977) or even Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972) – both evidence for the emergence of postmodernism in architectural discourse – but how architecture enters into more comprehensive modes of social critique. Next to Jameson’s, the stocktaking positions of Jürgen Habermas ([1980] 1997), Guattari vis-à-vis JeanFrançois Lyotard (Genosko 2002), and Cornelius Castoriadis ([1989] 1997) were all prompted by the situation in architecture. Moreover, architecture tends to be mentioned first in general readers on postmodernism, and the reasons given for this are interesting. One author explains that it is because “architectural style has an immediate impact upon people’s day-to-day lives: the environments in which they live, travel and work can deeply affect how people view themselves, relate to each other and experience the world” (Malpas 2005:13). It is also because the tenets of postmodern architecture “are helpfully theorized by a range of eloquent writers” (ibid.) who, by using accessible language and clear definitions, help architects to secure funding and commissions for their projects. Finally, “and most importantly,” architecture sets the postmodern scene for being so clearly “post-” in relation to modernism, making it easy to analyze in comparison to the

Edited by Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm