“A ball is a ball is a ball…”: Mediating personal freedom through architecture, art and design in the Swedish welfare state “

A ball is nothing but a ball, it is what you play with it that counts.” This was stated in a review after the inauguration of the multi arena The Stockholm Globe in 1989 – at the time said to be the world’s largest spherical building. The reviewer perceived the arena as part of the invisible media construction of the city and its interiors, and it was not architecture in itself that mattered but rather how it was used. The Globe was an abstract form, or empty sign, possible to project messages on as a gigant TV-studio, but it was also a space that could be organized in different ways; The Globe was a medium in itself.                       Taking The Globe as a starting point this paper will discuss how architecture can be understood as a medium for notions of “personal freedom.” How did ideas of a liberal society overlap with spatial organizations and aesthetics; how was “the ball” played through history? Drawing on two pivotal historical moments, the “middle way” (Childs 1936) in the 1930s when the welfare state emerged, and the 1980s “third way” (Giddens 1998) when it declined, this paper will trace how the notion of personal freedom has shifted as a discourse articulated in space and theory with architecture as a medium.                       The Third Way indicates a shift in the role of architecture in society, a shift that still impact most Western welfare state societies. Earlier architecture was tied to governing national economy, for example building welfare through public housing, regulating consumption, and educating the citizen. When the state withdrew from the building sector in the 1980s architecture became a driving force in other processes: new values were built through the emerging political economy based on “human capital,” with its base in a rethought relation between the individual and the society. This paper aims at sketching a brief history of architecture as a medium for notions of liberalism now and then.