Architectures of the Unbuilt Environment

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.QC 20180502</p

Architectures of the Unbuilt Environment

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.QC 20180502</p

Managing the Not-Yet: The Architectural Project Under Semiocapitalism

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

Pop Theory: The Architecture of Late Night Shopping

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 “extraarchitectural services” (visualization) allow the activity of shopping be put to more radical use

Suburbia transfigured

Urbanizing Suburbia considers three current and related processes underway in global cities: the hyper-gentrification of inner cities, the financialization of housing, and the structural changes occurring in the outer city. Rocketing housing prices have displaced residents from inner cities and created a rent gap in outer cities. Increasingly, municipalities, developers, and displaced residents search for opportunities in the suburban belts. Changes in demographics, densities, live/work ratios, and tenures are remaking outer cities, rendering them less and less suburban. The book examines these changes by looking at four key European cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, London, and Stockholm. It is a first attempt at understanding the three processes discussed here within one comprehensive explanatory framework

Bygger vi en blandad stad? : En analys genom kartläggningar av bostadsbyggandet i Stockholmsregionen

Bygger vi en blandad stad? Kartorna sompresenteras här ger en tydlig och empirisk bild övereffekterna av nyproduktionen av flerbostadshus iStockholmsregionen år 2017.QC 20230522</p

Bygger vi en blandad stad? : En analys genom kartläggningar av bostadsbyggandet i Stockholmsregionen

Bygger vi en blandad stad? Kartorna sompresenteras här ger en tydlig och empirisk bild övereffekterna av nyproduktionen av flerbostadshus iStockholmsregionen år 2017.QC 20230522</p

Insights from Portugal's research evaluation exercise

A founding preoccupation of arq, following the inauguration of the journal in 1995, was the introduction of government-mandated research assessment in British universities, examining the work of architecture schools alongside other disciplines. At that time, architect-scholars in the UK became preoccupied with how designs and disciplinary methods could be acknowledged as research, in a context where traditional gatekeepers of academic methods typically remained sceptical of architectural ways of knowing. Partly as a result of arq’s pioneering concerns, creative practice research – or research-by-design – is now well established in the academy. As a result, these pages have not addressed questions of university research assessment for some years. However, this letter from Lisbon returns to the theme. The authors consider Portugal’s research evaluation system, reviewing how such exercises might be reoriented internationally in order to support high-quality collaborative research in architecture

Hyper-gentrification and the urbanisation of suburbia

Suburban belts and outer-city areas in global cities such as Vancouver, London and New York are undergoing little noticed structural, social and formal changes. The diverse and often contradictory uses of ‘hyper’ and ‘super’ gentrification share an understanding that the process in question is one in which already gentrified inner-city neighbourhoods are undergoing a new phase of gentrification. Hyper-gentrification is more than simply a new phase in the process, as it undermines the tenets of some of the leading gentrification theories. Hyper-gentrification undermines the theories, as a local rent gap becomes a minor concern in these global processes and Ley’s white-collar employees and their cultural preferences become irrelevant. A key outcome of the hyper-gentrification of inner-cities has been the exodus of outpriced middle-class residents. Some cities, such as London, have specifically identified the suburban belt as a focus of future housing and densification