GO LO GO HI is a multi-modal enquiry into the relationship between masculine domesticities and the architectures of the suburban garage and penthouse apartment. The project adopts the garage and the penthouse as sites of enquiry, which means thinking through architecture as a cultural phenomenon, the agency of which includes but is not limited to spatial design, material compositions, visual representations, and historical contexts. While adhering to specific architectural typologies, both sites are assemblages of technology, consumption, leisure, and labour. The project presents the two sites as dialectical opposites—the suburban garage is embedded in the material world of the ground, the family, and the generic; the penthouse maintains a symbolic relationship to the production of the image, the individual subject, luxury real estate, and the city’s horizon. In this context, architecture operates as a spatial container that responds to and facilitates domestic encounters which are fluid—that change within and between sites, construct and contest social hierarchies, and offer refuge from (and at times entrapment within) social, political, and economic forces. By further assessing their representation in the arts, film, advertising media, and literature, this project also takes on board the cultural representations of these sites, moving beyond the conventional boundaries of architectural typologies. This interdisciplinary, practice-based approach is supported and interlaced with ethnographic writing, photodocumentaries, installations, and project proposals designed to reveal how these sites leak out into collective and private spaces within the city.

GO LO GO HI är en genomgripande undersökning av garaget och takvåningen, som genom den praxisbaserade metoden Sites of Enquiry belyser deras rumsliga roller i att forma och reflektera maskulina hemligheter. Genom denna multimodala analys har forskningsarbetet fördjupat sig i dessa platsers historiska, kulturella och sociala sammanhang, och visat upp de intrikata kopplingarna mellan arkitektur, teknologi och hemlighet, i relation till olika faser av kapitalismen. Avhandlingen avslöjar hur dessa rum, även där de skiljer sig åt, delar gemensamma strukturer gällande maktdynamik i hemmet, omvandlingar av hushållet och representationer av maskulinitet. Dessutom betonar den vikten av att ifrågasätta effekterna av dessa faktorer, både på individnivå och i en vidare sociokulturell kontext.

Avhandlingen bidrar till diskursen om arkitektur, urban teori, medievetenskap och mans- och maskulinitetsstudier genom att erbjuda nya insikter och perspektiv. Detta uppmuntrar till en nyanserad undersökning av arkitektur som en dynamisk aktör som interagerar med och påverkas av dess invånare. En analys av olika media och praktikbaserade interventioner syftar till att belysa rummets performativa karaktär, att engagera sig i dess ämnen och att väcka en arkitektonisk diskurs. Fallstudier inkluderar emblematisk arkitektur, som Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye och Ernő Goldfinger Balfron Tower, tillsammans med undersökningar av vardagsgarage i norra Sverige samt samtida fastighetsprojekt som Norra Tornen i Stockholm (Oscar Properties). Filmanalys inkluderar klassiska filmer som Ferris Bueller's Day Off, American Beauty, American Psycho och tv-serier som Homeland, och presenteras i relation till ett urval av praktikbaserade verk, installationer och etnografiska interventioner.

Därtill begrundar detta forskningsprojekt hemlighetens flytande och ständigt föränderliga natur, den avser att utmana traditionella berättelser och uppmuntrar en djupare förståelse för hur arkitektur formar och formas av hemmets vrå. En undersökning som förutsätter ett tvärvetenskapligt tillvägagångssätt, som överbryggar klyftan mellan genusvetenskap, arkitektur och medieanalys, och därmed öppnar möjligheter för framtida forskning och samarbeten.

GO LO GO HI ger ett tankeväckande perspektiv på samspelet mellan arkitektur, maskulinitet och hem-lighet. Det understryker behovet av fortsatt utforskning av dessa ämnen för att säkerställa att våra byggda miljöer och samhälleliga normer utvecklas på sätt som är mer inkluderande och återspeglar komplexiteten i det rådande samhället.

Photographic documentary of OBS! Vårby with additional text by Håkan Nilsson is published in January 2019 issue 132 of HJÄRNSTORM.

The suburban garage, arguably one of modernity’s most prolific reflexive inventions, has received little attention in terms of critical discourse in architecture. Contemporary Marxist feminism has been utilised in architectural theory to illustrate a series of binary conditions related to the home, including hidden forms of labour, paid and unpaid work, productive and reproductive spheres, public and private, sex and gender. Through this discourse, the subject of maintenance (which includes physical repairs and renovation, housework and homemaking) is broadly accepted as a means of producing and inhabiting architectural space. This innovation has been key in determining alternative forms of architectural practice that contest and intervene in dominant patriarchal images and descriptions of the home. The garage is uniquely situated between public and private realms, house and infrastructure, store and facilitator, place of work and labour, and has often been utilised as a free and reprogrammable space in close proximity to the home. This image of liminality is expressed in a variety of media including advertising and film, where the garage situates ambiguous forms of masculinity by connecting gendered forms of maintenance to images of technology and consumption. The suburban garage as reflexive invention initially responded to the need to house an automobile, but later it becomes a site of continual reimagining, responding not only to the collective subjectivity of the household but also to practices that cannot be contained within the program of the house. By questioning the binary applications of gender and maintenance theory, it may be possible to understand how capitalism operates to produce new forms of masculine domesticities and domestic masculinities.

Set against the background of a ‘general crisis’ that is environmental, political and social, this book examines a series of specific intersections between architecture and feminisms, understood in the plural. The collected essays and projects that make up the book follow transversal trajectories that criss-cross between ecologies, economies and technologies, exploring specific cases and positions in relation to the themes of the archive, control, work and milieu. This collective intellectual labour can be located amidst a worldwide depletion of material resources, a hollowing out of political power and the degradation of constructed and natural environments. Feminist positions suggest ways of ethically coping with a world that is becoming increasingly unstable and contested. The many voices gathered here are united by the task of putting critical concepts and feminist design tools to use in order to offer experimental approaches to the creation of a more habitable world. Drawing inspiration from the active archives of feminist precursors, existing and re-imagined, and by way of a re-engagement in the histories, theories and projected futures of critical feminist projects, the book presents a collection of twenty-three essays and eight projects, with the aim of taking stock of our current condition and re-engaging in our precarious environment-worlds.

Swetlana Heger and Janek Ozmin were commissioned to investigate the themes of Migrating Places of Production and Space as Product in relation to the town of Hohenems, Austria. The project investigated the history of material production in the Hohenems region and produced three woven sculptures that represent the globalised condition of manufacturing; it's relation to place and the role interdisciplinary work required to make of a representative image of place. The work was hung within a working aluminium anodising plant set in the town of Hohenems from which the sculptures provided a platform for debate on Migrating Places of Production and Space as Product.

Domestic Still Life

1. Blue - Yellow  180x 360cm 

2. Yellow - Red  180x 370cm 

3. Red - Blue  180x 355cm

This paper examines the work of Dan Graham Artist (1942) and Björn Yngve Lövin artist (1937) focusing on their explorations into the home and family. Both artists were involved in a number of installations and proposals that tie together the relationship between the individual dwelling, the nuclear family, the re-thinking of public and private conditions accosted to dwelling and the emerging risk society. Although operating through art practice both Grahams and Lövins propositions involve the production and simulation of architectural space from within which a series of narratives critiquing contemporary society. This paper argues that the results of the work are early examples of relational aesthetics combined with production of "fictional enterprise" as described by Sven-Olov Wallenstein. How can architects use these examples as ground for future research in relation to the production of new spaces of dwelling?

Isis Upon the Iron Tree: The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 has been widely recognised as one of the most important expose of modernism in the 20th century. This paper examines Sigurd Lewerentz "Poster no.2" designed under direct commision by the exhibition commitee but was reject for official purposes. The poster which is composed as a complex catalouge of exhibtion elements arranged around the Exhinbtions famous "L" logo, derived from an egyptian winged god, showed nuanced layering of the relationship between an emerging Swedish modernism. Unlike the official Poster No.1 which was reduced to the simple text "1930" a statement on the notion of the moment of change set in Lewerentz futuristic type font Poster no.2 presents mutliple view points from which to consider the arrival of Swedish Modernism. In order to analysise the poster a study of the pictorial content of the modernist manifesto "Acceptera" was undertaken from which themes are cross refferenced and super imposed back into the composition of Poster No.2.

The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition Editor Professor Roemer van Toorn, Professor Jüri Soolep, Sepideh Karami, Katja Hogenboom, Hannes Frykholm and Janek Ozmin, UMA School of Architecture, October 2014 consists of six separate reviews collated into a single exhibition. The content was captured on site at the Biennale including record conversations by the review group, interviews with Biennale exhibition contributors, collected media, photographs, sound recordings and videos by the authors. The collated work formed a pluralist, dialogical platform from which the Biennale Exhibition can be viewed. Alongside the printed review panels and video installations, a round table format was used to present various printed media, Biennale exhibition catalogues, and media from participating country pavilions and maps. This table then formed the basis for a debate on the Venice Biennale Exhibition by participating researchers. The Exhibition was mounted in Umeå School of Architecture and formed part of the Arts Campus Open House Research Days November 2014.

This paper examines Sigurd Lewerentz "Poster no.2" designed under direct commission by the exhibition committee but was reject for official purposes. The poster is composed as a complex catalogue of exhibition elements arranged around the Exhibitions famous "L" logo, derived from an Egyptian winged god, showed nuanced layering of the relationship between an emerging Swedish modernism. Unlike the official Poster No.1 which was reduced to the simple text "1930" a statement on the notion of the moment of change set in Lewerentz futuristic type font Poster no.2 presents multiple view points from which to consider the arrival of Swedish Modernism. In order to analyse the poster a study of the pictorial content of the modernist manifesto "Acceptera" was undertaken from which themes are cross referenced and super imposed back into the composition of Poster No.2.