Public Service

1. Paulina Aydin Home in Diaspora, Diploma Honours 2020

Teachers: Karin Matz, Rutger Sjögrim

What constitutes an architecture in service of others? Places where we labour to care for others? Spaces where we work to build and sustain a life that is shared with others? Understanding architectural space as intimately linked to the production of both biological life and the lives that we live and share, and also thinking of public space as a place for discourse, friction, conflict and negotiation; studio Public Service will interrogate and design architectures of shifting scales. We will move from the precise contours and shapes interacting with the labouring body in acts of maintenance and care, to the spatial enclosures capable of sustaining and creating community and a shared public life, onwards to the architectural complexes of mass media production and transmission in the service of a public life at the scale of population.

Through a yearlong investigation we will interrogate the processes, environments and labour that builds and sustains our public, shared, and mediated lives.

Studio methodology Our method rests on an openness to multiplicity (in interests, perspectives, and disciplines); and equal amounts of criticality, weekly tutorials with teachers and a weekly lecture (in tools, the practice, or theory), seminar or group review.

Through the year we will work with a sequence of projects that move from small to large. Each project presents a certain toolset (techniques of representation as well as techniques of interrogation) that is carried on to the next project. For each project there is a shift in scale, focus and distribution. Project 1 Over And Over And Over Again We have cleaning and exercise routines for our own bodies. But what is the cleaning routine for our built environment? What goes into keeping our cities in shape? We will spend the first half of the autumn semester digging into the world of cleaning our everyday environments; the invisible work which is being performed constantly in our cities. We will focus on the people who work with this invisible everyday maintenance and the architecture they inhabit!

Project 2 Our House What is a public space? What are the material realities of public spaces and what constitutes a life that is public? A life that is not work and not domestic, not labour and not recuperation. A life that is shared, where we construct ourselves as political subjects.

The project will task you with the design of a public building. We optimism, collaboration, joy and rigor. The schedule consists of

will focus on the program (what will be in it?) and conceptual analysis (why?), designing archetypes for public buildings and then finding sites for them to infiltrate, challenge and inhabit.

Project 3 Public Service – Broadcast Building on the experience from the first semester (the maintenance of space and the production of public space), we now turn our focus to the production and maintenance of a nationwide mediated public space through the design of a new headquarters for the Swedish public broadcasting companies; SVT (television), SR (radio) and UR (educational media).

We will investigate both existing and future needs, the shifting landscapes of broadcast media as well as the political and cultural role of an independent public broadcasting organisation. The project will focus on program and conceptual design, site selection and urban scale massing, leading up to a level of completion comparable to a competition entry.

Project 4 Public Service – Building For the final project it is time to inhabit, develop, refine, and explore the design proposed in the previous project. As we investigate strategies and techniques for controlling large scale projects from the urban level down to details and atmosphere, your projects will be fully articulated and detailed into a material environment.

Karin Matz KM is an architect (Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Queensland, and KTH (MSc. Arch)), lecturer at the School of Architecture at KTH and principal at the architecture office SECRETARY. Rutger Sjögrim RS is an architect (MSc. Arch, KTH), lecturer at the School of Architecture at KTH and a principal at the architecture office SECRETARY.