Seminar Courses 2021 Spring School of Architecture, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Seminars Spring 2021
Thordis Arrhenius.................................... Making History Anders Bergstrรถm..............Stockholm Exhibition 1930 Victor Edman..................... Bringing History to Life Catharina Gabrielsson..............................................Fieldwork Katja Grillner..................................Feminist Writing Jennifer Mack................ SPACE, the Final Frontier Helena Mattsson................... Intentional Communities Course codes for seminar courses YR 4: A42SEV YR 5: A52SEV
Frida Rosenberg......Sweden American Borderlands Erik Stenberg...........Million Program Era Housing
Seminar Courses
Making History – Postmodern Architecture under Pressure Thordis Arrhenius After strong protests Snøhettas proposal for restoring AT&T Headquarters by Philip Johnson was stopped. The hashtag SAVEATT brought together the architectural community from Robert Stern and Terry Farrell to Sir Norman Foster in a plea to save an icon building of postmodernism. As a result, in July 2018 AT&T’s former headquarters (built 1984) was designated the status as an individual landmark and protected; the youngest monument on Manhattan. Was the 2018 protection of the foremost post-modern icon on Manhattans a sign of the end of postmodernism or a beginning of a new monu-mental history postmodernism? With postmodernism as our case this seminar course will explore how architecture relate to its recent past. By re-reading central pomo-texts the seminar will focus on the entangled relationship between the architect, the image, and the building. We will explore how narratives of precedence, influence and media generate monumental histories and discourses.
Fieldwork Catharina Gabrielsson Entering the field, expanding the field, getting lost in the field… The significations of “field” and “fieldwork” may differ, depending on the disciplinary outset, but generally indicate explorations outside the boundaries of the office, library or studio. Fieldwork can be understood as a reality check; engaging closely with “real people, real places”, the realm of the “actually existing”, in order to invigorate or reformulate one’s practice. But it’s also associated with investigations underground; scrutinizing premises, searching to unearth factors and conditions that have been ignored, hidden or denied. Drawing on archaeology, anthropology and art practices, in this course we investigate the implications of fieldwork in and for architecture understood as a critical spatial practice. The course is based on an incremental process of site inventories in response to key readings.
Feminist Writing Katja Grillner This seminar course provides an introduction to architecture and gender, and develops tools for pursuing feminist articulations and interpretations of architecture as discipline and profession. In the course we will study contemporary feminist theory and architectural practices and investigate how architecture and other built structures relate to them. The course is divided into nine seminars structured around four modules, a study visit and a final presentation. Each module consists of two seminars with introductions, discussions and written reflections on presented readings and projects. The modules are thematically organised addressing in order positionings, intersec-tions, specificities and materialities.
The Archive of the Stockholm Exhibition 1930 Anders Bergström Sweden’s most referred architectural event serves here as a case study for a critical historiography. Ever since the Stockholm Exhibition opened in 1930, its importance has been generally acknowledged as a breakthrough for modernism in Sweden. Although criticized at the time, the exhibition was included in the canon of modern architecture at an early stage. As the exhibition soon turned into a virtual object, however, its reception must now be based on primary material that can be referred to as the “archive”. The seminar highlights this material, consisting of drawings, photographs, documents and printed texts, as well as the limited remains of the exhibition itself. ArkDes Collection: photo C. G. Rosenberg 1930.
SPACE, the Final Frontier: Anthropological Approaches to Architecture Jennifer Mack A recent “spatial turn” in anthropology has expanded “space” from a metaphorical concept to a material one. How do current anthropologists approach architecture as both site and tool for social change, political action, and debates about cultural heritage? Here, the built environment is treated not as neutral background but as a product of conflict and negotiation. First, we familiarize ourselves with key ideas about social space from Anzaldúa, de Certeau, Haraway, Lefebvre, Stewart, and more. Then, we read recent ethnographies of modernist housing, garage sales, public gardens, borders, skateboarders’ favorite handrails, gated communities, and others, exploring “space” as both a theoretical and an empirical category.
Restoration: Bringing History to Life Victor Edman Architectural restoration is a professional field that has evolved mainly over the last two centuries. The seminar addresses historical and theoretical perspectives on this development, with a focus on the Swedish context. The objective is to provide an overview of the history and theory of architectural restoration and to initiate a critical discussion of the subject. The seminar also aims at an understanding of how the historic buildings we meet today have been transformed by later interventions, often intended to make them more ‘historical’. The seminar includes short lectures and discussions of relevant texts. An individual essay is to be presented at the end of the semester.
Malmöhus under restoration.
Intentional Communities: Collective Housing Experiments and the Radical Potential of the Everyday Life Helena Mattsson If "a home is not house," as Reyner Banham stated, what is the site for domestic life (care, social reproduction, human relations etc.)? What forces and spaces create an environment for living? This seminar course will critically examine experiments in alternative ways of organizing and giving form to every-day life – intentional communities – through history up until today. You are encouraged to speculate on collective living environments' future potentials and investigate history as a site for radical phantasies. The assignment is to create a "retroactive manifesto" (think of Rem Koolhaas Delirious New York) of an intentional community that stands in conversation with the past. The Institute for the Formation of Character, New Lanark, opened 1816.
Housers in a Swedish American Landscape Frida Rosenberg A critical history of domestic architecture with a focus on housing reformers in the 20th century. The premise of this seminar is twofold: to acknowledge the role of female actors in the larger scope of improving the housing condition; and to understand the transfer of knowledge in a Sweden American Borderland. In the period from the 1930s to the 1960s the role of design was an important arena for cultural contacts between Sweden and the United States. Investigating the complexity of cultural, social, and economic exchanges and its implications for trajectories in housing development can offer alternative ways of framing the progression of dwelling. And locate sites of female housing heroes. Riksrådsvägen rowhouses by Léonie Geisendorf, photo taken in 1959 by Catherine Bauer Wurster.
Million Program Era Housing: Sustainable or Sad Stories? Erik Stenberg The architects and builders engaged in the construction of Sweden’s mass housing areas during the Post War period developed at least forty (40) different structural systems and construction methods using prefabricated concrete elements. This seminar course will investigate some of the stories (factual and fictional peoples and histories) behind, between, and beyond these systems and methods. Given a contemporary situation and longer time frame in which the urgent need for re-use and re-purposing of the existing built environment and the prolonged critique of Modernist housing across the world can be seen, how can architects re-assess, re-tell, or restore the systems and methods of the Million Program Era? Will these stories tell of sustainable or sad housing?
Image from 1973 article ”Bostadsdebatten är snedvriden – Tensta är bra att bo i” in the journal HSB Nytt.
Courses: A42SEV, A52SEV