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Architectures of the Unbuilt Environment
KTH, School of Architecture and the Built Environment (ABE), Architecture. (Critical Studies in Architecture)
2018 (English)Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary (Other academic)
Abstract [en]

This doctoral thesis offers a critical theorization of architecture’s shifting orientations towards the lives that it inevitably shapes and molds. The fourteen essays that comprise this thesis address a range of seemingly superficial transformations in architecture’s disciplinary landscape, which occur in Sweden in the second decade of the twenty-first century. When viewed in aggregate, these transformations point to a decisive shift in what architecture does, evidencing phases of withdrawal (through deregulations and enclosures) and facilitation (through exercises in projection and connection), ultimately suggesting the arrival of a condition that I refer to as the unbuilt environment, wherein the project replaces the building as architecture’s primary outcome.

 

Through this doctoral research, architecture is also examined as a key technology in the neoliberal project. A discipline that is vested in the production of subjects and environments, architecture is shown here to draw, write, and dream forth a vast range of “container technologies” that enclose, move, shape, support, and produce us as subjects, facilitating certain kinds of lives and not others, from the interior out. 

 

The research was motivated by the need to find the words to think, write, transform, and even negate what architecture was doing, when it was doing what it was doing, to lives led and to life itself, in the architectural present. My aim was always to produce thick, transformative, and essayistic theorizations of the state of things, which would be operative in a critical register. I also wanted to show, that the present constitutes a crucial site for the making of architectural theory. In running alongside and in excess of architectural practice, critical architectural theory, I argue, can produce a space for a yet-un-thought architecture: an architecture that might aspire to facilitate life at the scale of the population.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2018. , p. 422
Series
TRITA-ARK. Akademisk avhandling, ISSN 1402-7461 ; 2018-02
Keywords [en]
The Unbuilt Environment; Withdrawal Symptoms; Pastel Cells; Container Technologies; Instant Archives; A Facilitative Environment; The Fog; The Promise of a Lack; The State of Things; The Liquid Seam; In Aggregate; Ghosts in Shells; Images of Desire.
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226945ISBN: 9789177297185 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-226945DiVA, id: diva2:1202641
Public defence
2018-05-18, Kollegiesalen, Brinellvägen 8, Stockholm, 14:00 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
Note

QC 20180502

Available from: 2018-05-03 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2022-09-14Bibliographically approved
List of papers
1. Managing the Not-Yet: The Architectural Project Under Semiocapitalism
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Managing the Not-Yet: The Architectural Project Under Semiocapitalism
2017 (English)In: Architecture and Culture, ISSN 2050-7828, Vol. 5, no 2, p. 213-220Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Under conditions of semiocapitalism - wherein signs, rather than goods or even services, are the main output of abstract production - the architectural "project" has become the primary technology for organizing architectural labor. The project, we argue, also acts as a capture device capable of linking economic production and the production of subjectivity, facilitating both the reproduction of (architectural) labor, on the one hand, and the financing of schemes, on the other. Both outcomes, we posit, are dependent on the production of anticipatory affects that imbue legitimacy by citing the past and factoring in the future.

National Category
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-220663 (URN)10.1080/20507828.2017.1325110 (DOI)000417345400005 ()2-s2.0-85045852700 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20180109

Available from: 2018-01-09 Created: 2018-01-09 Last updated: 2022-06-26Bibliographically approved
2. Anticipation and Other Affective Productions: Theorizing the Architectural Project in Action
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Anticipation and Other Affective Productions: Theorizing the Architectural Project in Action
2018 (English)In: After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research / [ed] Hélène Frichot with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm, New York and Barcelona: ACTAR, 2018Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
New York and Barcelona: ACTAR, 2018
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226935 (URN)
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
3. Pop Theory: The Architecture of Late Night Shopping
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Pop Theory: The Architecture of Late Night Shopping
2017 (English)In: Architecture and Culture, ISSN 2050-7828, Vol. 5, no 3, p. 513-524Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Inviting audiences into the late-night, precarious world of (photo) shopping, we explore the way in which the ghostly figures of the Photoshop world - its exhausted architects, indebted consumers, and the two-dimensional cut-outs that populate its spaces - are all put to use in a project of producing subjectivities through environments. Feminist critiques of visuality provide a basis in understanding the play between bodies and worlds that set this production in motion. By looking at the mechanics of "pre-occupation" that allow us to inhabit such images, we speculate: could a re-theorization of this most commercial of "extra-architectural services" (visualization) allow the activity of shopping be put to more radical use?

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis, 2017
Keywords
visualization, Photoshop, feminist critique, architecture, representation
National Category
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-223305 (URN)10.1080/20507828.2017.1367484 (DOI)000423950600015 ()2-s2.0-85045514918 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20180216

Available from: 2018-02-16 Created: 2018-02-16 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
4. Desire for Democracy
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Desire for Democracy
2018 (English)In: Aiming for Democratic Architecture / [ed] Tove Dumon Wallsten, Stockholm: Svenska Institutet and MYCKET , 2018, p. 6-8Chapter in book (Other (popular science, discussion, etc.))
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Stockholm: Svenska Institutet and MYCKET, 2018
National Category
Humanities and the Arts Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226926 (URN)
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
5. The Long Nineties: Reassessing ‘A Complex Order’ in Semiocapitalism
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The Long Nineties: Reassessing ‘A Complex Order’ in Semiocapitalism
2016 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Other academic)
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226927 (URN)
Conference
Architecture of Deregulations: Postmodernism, Politics, and the Built Environment in Europe, 1975–1995
Note

“Architecture of Deregulations: Postmodernism, Politics, and the Built Environment in Europe, 1975–1995,” at the KTH School of Architecture and Moderna museet, Stockholm, March 10–12, 2016, and was organized by Helena Mattsson and Catharina Gabrielsson.

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
6. A City of Bits and Atoms
Open this publication in new window or tab >>A City of Bits and Atoms
2016 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Other academic)
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226938 (URN)
Conference
Young Bauhaus Research Colloquium, at the 13th International Bauhaus Colloquium, “Dust and Data,” at the Bauhaus Universität, Weimar, October 26–19, 2016.
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
7. YES Boss! The 8 house: Towards a projective critique
Open this publication in new window or tab >>YES Boss! The 8 house: Towards a projective critique
2015 (English)In: Drawing On, ISSN 2059-9978, Vol. 1, p. 127-138Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Writing of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson locates the (postmodern) desire for architecture in its image. Alloy- like, the architecture of the early twenty-first century amalgamates image and material structure and in so doing sprawls simultaneously across the spaces of media and the city. From concept diagram to post-occupancy photograph, the building is now both preceded and augmented by a distributed array of high-resolution images. A brand from the moment of inception, the “distributed form” of the contemporary architectural project in fact seems carefully designed to facilitate its on-going dissemination. It is this relation – that of architecture to its image – which this essay critically addresses, exploring what it is that such projects actually project, and how we might – as architects and critics – critically engage with that content. 

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2015
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-176085 (URN)
Note

QC 20151102

Available from: 2015-10-30 Created: 2015-10-30 Last updated: 2022-06-23Bibliographically approved
8. Welcome to The Promenade City: A Gentrifictional Cartography of Stockholm in the Postindustrial Age'
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Welcome to The Promenade City: A Gentrifictional Cartography of Stockholm in the Postindustrial Age'
2015 (English)In: Architecture and Culture, ISSN 2050-7828, Vol. 3, no 3, p. 397-411Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

As we enter the age of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labor, postindustrial cities like Stockholm, Sweden, are witnessing both the emergence of a post-regulatory planning policy climate and the concomitant transfer of responsibilities for design regulation and housing provision from the municipality to distributed networks of producer-consumers. As governments effectively withdraw from direct engagement in city building efforts, new divisions of labor and new forms of control thus become apparent. This essay considers the implications of these shifts by addressing the “gentrifictions” through which they operate. Deploying notions of “chora” and “container technologies” as they have been developed through the feminist scholarship of Luce Irigaray and Zoë Sofia, we ultimately advocate a radical rethinking of our relation to the unobtrusive ‘environments’ that facilitate our (compulsorily productive) experiences of the city and our participation in real-estate games of occupation and exchange.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Taylor & Francis, 2015
Keywords
Gentri-fiction, post-regulatory, cognitive architecture, affect, planning, real-estate infrastructure
National Category
Other Social Sciences
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-165835 (URN)10.1080/20507828.2015.1082056 (DOI)000376019200010 ()2-s2.0-85009789267 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20160613

Available from: 2015-04-29 Created: 2015-04-29 Last updated: 2024-03-18Bibliographically approved
9. Vertigo
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Vertigo
2015 (English)In: LO-RES, ISSN 2002-0260, Vol. 1, p. 57-62Article in journal (Other academic) Published
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226931 (URN)
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2022-07-11Bibliographically approved
10. Let the Right One In
Open this publication in new window or tab >>Let the Right One In
2012 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation only (Other academic)
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226942 (URN)
Conference
The Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) conference “Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence,” at the London Metropolitan University, November 15–17, 2012.
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
11. The Promise of a Lack: Responding to (Her) Real-Estate Career
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The Promise of a Lack: Responding to (Her) Real-Estate Career
2015 (English)In: The Avery Review: Critical Essays on Architecture, ISSN 2473-3407, no 8Article in journal (Other academic) Published
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
New York: , 2015
Keywords
critical real estate theory, feminist theory
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-193064 (URN)
Note

QC 20160929

Available from: 2016-09-27 Created: 2016-09-27 Last updated: 2024-03-18Bibliographically approved
12. White, Wide and Scattered: Picturing (Her) Housing Career
Open this publication in new window or tab >>White, Wide and Scattered: Picturing (Her) Housing Career
2016 (English)In: This Thing Called Theory / [ed] Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo, George Themistokleous, London: Taylor & Francis, 2016, p. 231-241Chapter in book (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

It is in the seductive space of real estate that finance and architecture find the space to flirt, collaborating on the shaping of brains, minds, and bodies through biopolitical and noological processes of subject formation, of assujettissement. Our real estate “choices” — it is as choices that they are presented to us as too often ingenuousaffect addled consumers — are conditioned by exposure to image worlds that over-determine how interior environmental niches are carved out, and how subjects and environments are co-produced.

The phenomenon of contemporary real estate also includes the rise of the entrepreneurial subject that we, with an irreverent nod to Maurizio Lazzarato’s formulation, call the ‘indebted woman’. Who is this ‘indebted woman’ and how has she come to be captured by the curated interior environments of contemporary real-estate? We will argue that the aesthetic figure of the ‘indebted woman’, who we frame for the purposes of our polemic, is diagrammatically captured in three ways: 1. By a milieu of ubiquitous whiteness producing the illusion of an infinitely receding horizon of possibilities; 2. By the recurring motifs of designerly objects placed so as to appear casually scattered, producing a mood of restlessness, a potential of mobility that endlessly defers a capacity to settle in and really make herself at home; 3. By the wide-angle framing of the real-estate image, which encloses her in a co-productive exchange between curated interior and ‘point of view’, with the result of over-determining her subjectivity as a biopolitically and noologically subjected subject. [HR1] Our[HF2]  plan is to picture these diagrams of capture, all of which are amply illustrated in the professionally produced real-estate imagery that provides content for real-estate websites like hemnet.se, booli.se, design blogs, and the real-estate pages of the daily press. WAs such, we propose to picture the ‘housing career’ of the indebted woman, and to do this we will take recourse to a fledgling theoretical framework we denominate feminist real-estate theory. We use this formulation as both a provocation, and to test what can be achieved with this ‘thing called theory’. Whether this theory will prove to be merely a tool of analysis, or else a means of critically projecting into what otherwise risks being a foreclosed future, is an issue, the risks and promises of which, we hope to discuss in our closing remarks.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
London: Taylor & Francis, 2016
Series
Critiques
Keywords
real estate theory, feminist theory, architectural theory
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-193068 (URN)10.4324/9781315406268-35 (DOI)2-s2.0-85026556052 (Scopus ID)
Note

QC 20161013

Available from: 2016-09-27 Created: 2016-09-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
13. The Illusory Autonomy of the Real Estate Interior
Open this publication in new window or tab >>The Illusory Autonomy of the Real Estate Interior
2018 (English)In: Rethinking the Social—Making Effects / [ed] Sten Gromark, Jennifer Mack, and Roemer van Toorn, Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2018Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Barcelona and New York: ACTAR, 2018
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226944 (URN)
Note

QC 20180515

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved
14. In Captivity: The Real Estate of Co-Living
Open this publication in new window or tab >>In Captivity: The Real Estate of Co-Living
2017 (English)In: Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies / [ed] Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting, London: Routledge, 2017, p. 140-149Chapter in book (Other academic)
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
London: Routledge, 2017
Series
Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities
National Category
Architecture
Research subject
Architecture
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-226934 (URN)978-1-138-30487-1 (ISBN)
Note

QC 20180507

Available from: 2018-04-27 Created: 2018-04-27 Last updated: 2024-03-15Bibliographically approved

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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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