Stockholm was a city that really made me question its ambitions. Perhaps my weekend excursion was simply too short to discover anything beyond its message to tourists: "we're green, we're conservative, we're smart, we're fashionable, we're designed, we're growing!). The city was fairly insistent upon using clean design to distract me from how it worked as a system. Could the notion of the Picturesque (masking undesirable truths) be at work at an urban scale as well?
BACK TO THE FOUNDATIONS
My Swedish friend told me that Stockholm is built on a foundation of rock, so they have to drill deep into the rock to build anything. As a result, their buildings have extremely sturdy foundations. He works in demolition, so I can probably trust his opinion on this.
DESIGN CULTURE
Ahh, the Kulturhuset ("Culture House") in the central square Sergels torg. Built in the 1960's in an era of Modernist ambitions, it is massive, located at the heart of major transportation hubs, and consists of many layers. Above is the cleanest, most public layer.
Underneath the public ground is a semi-private level that serves as circulation and of course, mid-end and high-end retail. There is nothing that is not cleanly designed in this multi-layered plaza. Ironic that a lot of these shops are Swedish graphic and interior design stores.
But upon closer examination, maybe architecture isn't the solution for their obsession with cleanliness. Maybe they should clean their ceilings first. But what are we looking at through these glass lenses?
Ah, on the layer above resides the infamous glass obelisk. This thing looks ancient, rock solid, and devoid of culture in the daytime and lights up at night to become "cultured," I guess. I'm not sure if the statement is meant to represent some sort of dichotomy in the work and night-lives of the Sweds.
OLD CITY
Approaching Gamla Stan (the Old City). Over to the left you can see the Parliament house, semi-circular, a shocking combination of contemporary structure and nostalgic veneer. Once again, there is the idea that in order to be culturally cohesive, your building has to look like its surroundings. Although, it does express its "real" structure towards the skyline, so maybe something symbolic can be said, like without the old, the new wouldn't be possible?
Caves vs. corridor urban typology in the old city.
I am severely afraid of anything that looks like this. It feels like you're marching to your own execution. Don't get me wrong, it's extraordinarily beautiful and clean, but lacking the dirtiness and grittiness that comes with...well, life. Walking through this makes me feel like I'm confined to the public zone that somebody wanted me to see. I want to see the underlying system that governs this, and I refuse to be silenced by beautiful exteriors.
MODERNIST AND CONTEMPORARY AMBITIONS
Gunnar Asplund's Modernist ambitions. (1928) The use of abstraction of the classical orders and radical centralized form to establish monumentality. Apparently, from looking and this building, knowledge should be revered. It's too bad the building was closed over Easter weekend, but the exterior also conveys a sense of centrality and of controlled elegance. The rotunda is eerily reminiscent of the Panopticon.
Sketch of the Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibit in the Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art). Clean lines of the exihibit vs my not-so-clean sketch (I'm never patient enough to wait for an inkwash to dry before closing my sketchbook...)
Contemporary ambitions for urban growth can be seen in the massive cranes that dominate the skyline. What kind of city does Stockholm want to become? How can they reconcile their fervor of building with their apparent dislike of immigrants and foreigners? Apparently, building more seems to be the answer. I'm dying to see how this city will look like in a couple of years.
JUNKSPACE
Yes, Skansen (a miniature Viking village) is incredible, because it provides visitors the opportunity to go back in time and explore pre-industrial built environment. But one might question the validity of such an open-air museum. Monuments of monuments of meaning lost.
Infrastructure penetrates the waterfront, and a city of junkspace ensues. Reminds me of the chaos of South Bank in London. It would be interesting to see how the city deals with this leftover space, which I think has a lot of architectural potential.
