After two days of construction the floating lawn (now properly named Åke) is complete and floats with pride.

Manymanymany thanks and hugs to all of you that helped us put it together.

In the summer, it’s always nice to go somewhere.
In Stockholm, many of the people leaving the city go out to the archipelago at the edge of the baltic sea.
It is nice there.
Some people go boating (or sailing) and a lot just stay at their summer houses doing (usually not a lot) things like reading and having barbecues at a lawn close to their house. If they are lucky the lawn is also close to the water.
This is very popular. So popular that the prices of these summer houses limit most people from actually experience this local eden. Thus many swedes of middle to lower income travel to places like Tailand with cheep charter flights and hotels.

We wanted to hang out on a lawn, reading and doing barbecues.
But we also wanted to hang out in the city, and we thought that it would be a little bit boring to be in the same place the entire summer.
Lucky for us there is a lot of water in Stockholm. It is, after all, often referred to as “The Venice of the North”.
So we decided to build a floating lawn with a small engine so we could move it around.

Construction starts tomorrow, friday 18:th underneath “Nya Årstabron” at the “Södermalm”-side. Drop by and say hallo if you like. We are nice people and will probably play some music, do some barbecueing and have som beer.

You can download the construction drawings (with cost and weight calculations) if you want to build one yourself. The total cost is around 15000 SEK excluding the engine.

grasmattan_a001.pdf

grasmattan_a002.pdf

grasmattan_a003.pdf

Project by: Markus Wagner, Sara Liberg, Karin Matz, Ludvig Netré, Joel Joannet, Fredrik Andersson, Daniel Johansson, Ola Keijer, Caroline Carlsson, Rutger Sjögrim, Mattias Beckman, Anders Berensson

A small sign produced during the summer of 2009 (as a part of the work “en annan paviljong” by Anna Koch, Weld) for a pavilion in the park Tantolunden, in Stockholm. Telling the story of the pavilions spectacular past.

Referenced by Wikipedia here.

Visit Weld.

Read the sign as a .pdf

Project by: Fredrik Andersson, Anders Berensson, Daniel Johansson, Joel Jouannet, Sara Liberg, Ola Keijer, Helen Runting, Rutger Sjögrim och Markus Wagner.

Due to the migratory nature of Svensk Standard members, this winter has seen the upstart of a small Svensk Standard branch located in Melbourne, Australia, accompanied by an entry in the Laneway Competition 2010, a public art competition in Melbourne.

While researched and conceptualized by the Melbourne team, the production would be split between Sweden and Australia, creating an intentional glitch, a lost-in-translation-factor where one team was perfectly in tune with the sites, with their physical and cultural context, and the other would be completely clueless.

On January 5th, the following letter was received in Stockholm:

“Dear Ola, Markus, Sara and Rutger,

Tristan and I have been wandering the lanes for weeks now.

At first we were attracted to the dirtiest and the ugliest of them: the lanes that felt like vertical sewers. Tiring of wading through the rubbish, however, we soon turned our attention to the sleaziest lanes which thread through the business district, behind the strip clubs and seedy bars and corporate headquarters and law courts. Eventually, we became dissatisfied with our own journeys and elected to follow others, who - more often than not - never went into the lanes, and when they did, disappeared into the rear doors of what we can only imagine might be workplaces, but which might have been something entirely different.

The mystery, it seems, was always on the other sides of those doors and walls: in the private spaces behind and alongside the lanes. In the buildings. The lanes themselves seemed to hold little mystery of their own: everything seemed so familiar, just a repetition of elements. A basic geometry. The familiar, the recognisable, that which makes the laneways what they are, and in turn Melbourne what it is, had reached a point of saturation.

Perhaps we can only value that which is unknown, foreign, strange. We feel this must be the case.

In order to advance our project further, we therefore send you the unappreciated, banal and everyday artefacts which we collected in our journeys, objects (and, indeed signs) which make up the graphic and material language of the lanes – a language which we (like perhaps millions of other Melbournians) are presently unable to read, in our current state of distracted overexposure. We hope that you might take them and through your own work make them foreign to us again. We would like you to estrange us from them, just as you are estranged from us.

Take one or many, and do what you can. If you need any further information (dimensions, materials, or anything else that may be useful in this task), please do not hesitate to contact us.

With grateful thanks,

Your Colleagues in Melbourne.

Helen and Tristan.“

PDF - Melbourne brief / object catalog

Thrilled by the sudden removal of contextual restraint, the Stockholm team grabbed their pens and laptops and set out create something thoroughly unnatural.

Four days later the following three concepts, along with a short letter and some rather strange sketches, were sent back to Melbourne:

“Dear Helen and Tristan,

We have worked with the material you sent us and tried to respond to our assignment in an interesting way. We quickly realized that there was no way that we could fully understand these objects whithout their context, what parts they play in the economic and social structures of Melbourne. The objects that we were given all derive from a need and are connected to the local and global programmatic system in the area. Like many European architecture offices working out of context, for example in China, we perform an architectural colonialism by ignoring the objects’ context and functions. Instead we invent a new programmatic system for the objects to work within. Three ideas have been produced for this, concepts that can be used individually or somehow combined:

The Laneway Back Alley Band

The object move mechanically and correspond to the different sounds in the “Laneway Back Alley Funk” which is played through a hidden speaker system. The objects get a new relation to each other, and become parts of a new system that replaces their former programmes.

The Talking Totem Pole

The totems whisper to each other continuously, amuses itself by telling funny stories etc, but whenever someone approaches the alley they hush each other to silence. However, the totem can be aggravated and stressed out by the presence of a crowd, yelling out curses to anyone present. The pole is constructed from the given objects in the catalogue.

The Inanimate Objects Animal Masquerade Parade

Disguising the objects as creatures with costumes, creating a sence of unnaturalness by adding the image of nature. For added estrangement it is also possible to apply this concept to the preceding programmes.

“

PDF - Stockholm response

PDF - Sketches

Back in Melbourne the sweded objects were recontextualized and injected back into their original environment as agents of estrangement.

At the 22nd of January the final proposal was handed over to the City of Melbourne.

“Estrangement

Through an international collaboration firmly grounded in Melbourne but with roots in Stockholm, Sweden, we wish to reframe an experience of Melbourne’s laneway spaces through the performance of an architecture of estrangement…

Weary of both the dominant modes of working as “foreign architects”and of the dominant elements of architectural discourse addressing “place-making”, we would dearly like to consciously side-step both the ignorant imposition of foreign forms on unfamiliar contexts, andstrategies of “gentrification through glorification” whereby elements of historic urban fabric are scrubbed clean of their present (undesirable) uses in order to introduce foreign programs. Whilst the former mightbe termed the “Bilbao effect” and has been idolised by those interestedin placemarketing via architecture (or simply besotted with Frank O.), the latter presents a more covert way of sanitizing the messy, gritty, difficult areas in cities by creating “buzz”. Through all of work, and this submission, we wish to propose an alternative to this way of working as architects, and a conscious critique of the above.

Perhaps there is a hint of irony in reacting against processes of architectural santization when talking about Melbourne’s laneways, long a city-sized sanitation device in themselves. Despite radical changes to the form and fabric of the city, and as such to the buildings abutting their edges, the laneways have retained their utility as a “backstage” to Melbourne’s streets. A place (once you move away from the lattescented alleys of the south-eastern corner of the city) where garbage bins rest in neat rows, leant upon by piles of cardboard boxes and pyramids formed by used drums of cooking oil. Even the rings of empty bottles circling upturned milkcrates like sharks seem familiar, even somehow necessary within this environment – certainly not a surprise, in any case. It is in this safe, familiar, utilitarian order of “things” that the site of our proposed project lies.

In wandering the laneways – whether they are the sanitized, the overdesigned, the messy, the commercial or the deserted variety – all the mystery seems to be located inside the buildings, in the places that you can’t go, through the back doors with their industrial locks, whilst the laneways themselves dissolve into a predictable repetition of a basic material language (bin, bin, bin, oil drum, boxes) which becomes rapidly oversaturated: after a while, it all somehow fails to register. From a sociological perspective one might pose that objects only become visible to us, only register, when they access controversy – when they are acclaimed as “innovations”, when they are at a distance and thus “foreign”, when they break down, or when they become a “fiction”1. It is this final category that motivates the present proposal, which aims to make the gritty and utilitarian laneway objects a momentary fiction, in order that we might see them again, and as such see the spaces which they define in a new way.“

PDF - Final porposal

Project by: Helen Runting, Tristan Main, Ola Keijer, Rutger Sjögrim, Sara Liberg, Markus Wagner.

A photosynth showing the Open Studio and the Beijing Field Office at NO+CH09 three days into production.

This summer a crew from Svensk Standard got invited to participate in the NOTCH09 festival in Beijing, China.

It is a two week long festival exhibiting  music, fashion, design and architecture from the Nordic countries as well as from China (NOrdic + CHina = NOTCH). We are participating in the part of the festival called Open Studio. It’s a space on the top floor of one of the buildings used by the festival and conceived as mixing chamber for artists/designers/architect exhibiting at NOTCH.

In this space we have created a small office for ourselves. We call it the Beijing Field Office. It will, for two weeks (we started last weekend and production ends at the 7th of november), conduct research on the city of Beijing, focused on the part of Chang’an Avenue leading west from Tiananmen Square to the 2nd Ring Road.

To help us in these studies we have invited six Chinese nationals, living in Beijing, of different professions, age, sex and backgrounds. They are our clients, our main resource of knowledge. With them we have discussed and created an architectural program, specific to each client. Their opinions, interests and desires. Our clients are subjective, we ask them for THEIR opinions, thus making them unquestionable experts.

As a consequence the research won’t give answers to general questions, concerning lots of people. Instead it provides specific answers to specific questions and people. Making the research narrow but precise.

The six different architectural programs will then be processed into architectural forms and spaces, eventually put together into a single potential building, in the end finding itself a site in proximity to the study site along the west part of Chang’an Avenue.

The project is produced along a ten meters long wall divided into the days of the festival, an architectural almanac. It tells the past of our process and hints at the future.

At this moment we are nearing the end of our research phase and have started to transcribe the interviews made with each client into concepts and sketches for program.

So if you happen to be in Beijing this week, pleas stop by and visit us at The Village North, in Sanlitun.

Sorry about the late notice.

At NOTCH09 Svensk Standard is:

Anders Berensson
Caroline Ektander
Daniel Johansson
Helen Runting
Rutger Sjögrim
Markus Wagner

Project funded by IASPIS

Sunday afternoon sunshine, an old industrial area and some red plastic soda cases makes for relaxed conversations in anticipation of the final Architectural Battle showdown. May 2009, Lövholmen, Stockholm.

About a month ago, we were asked by the Cities the magazine people if we could design a small exhibition space for them. They were trying to get accepted into an event held by the European Year of Creativity and needed a proposal for an exhibition space that showed that they meant business.

They got accepted, but sadly there wasn’t any need (or money) for the proposed space.

Now, unbuilt architecture is always a very sad thing, so we thought that if we posted it here perhaps someone else might find some use for it. It’s very low budget, so if you don’t have a lot of money but need an exhibition space, this is what you do:

First, call a supplier of cargo pallets (usually there are some at the outskirts of every major European city). Cargo pallets are interesting because they exist in a constant flow. Either being trafficked around, to or from the recipients of various merchandise, or stacked in some warehouse. In order for the logistics industry to have quick access to pallets there is always a surplus of them and as they deteriorate they get downgraded through a system of different classes based on their quality, being constantly reused. So if you ask a supplier of pallets nicely, he or she might let you borrow some for free as long as you hand them back unspoiled.

Otherwise they can be bought and sold back at a difference of ca 3 euros / pallet and that still makes them pretty cheap.

We’re going to use the pallets as the basic building block for the space. They can be stacked in lots of different ways and what you’ll eventually end up with depends, of course, on what kind of space you need. We wanted large wall areas for projections and printed images, but also some kind of “lounge” feature as well as the flexibility of a simple table and perhaps some folding chairs.

Once you stacked the pallets into a topography that pleases you, strap them together using cargo straps. This fixes the pallets into position and makes the stacks very stable. Do it right and the straps will be almost invisible from the outside.

When the pallets are strapped, the inside needs to be clad with some boards. What kind of material you choose depends once again on the purpose of the topography. Usually some kind of plywood or particle boards will do just fine. Cheaper boards will wear more rapidly so the type you want will depend on how long the topography will be used. The boards are then screwed to the pallets.

You can now paint the space in the color of your choice (or just leave it if you like the look of it). We went with white since it’s neutral and good for projections. We also left the outside naked, with the pallets exposed.

Remember; don’t paint the pallets. This will make them worth less when you sell them back.

Here are the cost estimates for our space:
(in euros)

Euro-pallets x 128 = 400
Plywood/Particleboards = 200
Cargo straps x 10 = 150
Paint (4 cans) + Brushes = 150
Ikea table = 42
Pillows x 30 = 90

+ transports + extra

TOTAL = ca 1500

I was recently told by a friend that there existed a large telephone tower made of steel, (kind of like a square Eiffel tower) in Stockholm during the first half of the 20th century and after a short google run, this is what i found:

Apparently it was built in 1887, at a time when there were about 5500 telephones in Stockholm. Each of these telephones were connected to a wire that would leave the house or apartment suspended on small steel hooks and angles. It would make its way through the narrow streets of 19th century Stockholm eventually ending up in the tower. At the base of the tower, in the building it stood on, was a great hall where rows of telephone operators would connect the incoming signal to whatever outgoing cable the caller asked for. The signal would then leave the great tower, once again passing through the streets and leaping across the roofs, eventually reaching the house of the recipient.

The tower, acting like a full scale diagram, explains perfectly to anybody looking at it, the logic behind the telephone system. Imagine what the internet would look like, illustrated like this. Or how it would sound!

In a complaint sent in to one of the larger news papers at the time, a concerned resident of Stockholm complains about “obehaget af den olidliga musik, som telefontrådar kunna åstadkomma, och många hafva nog lidit af deras nervskakande disharmonier”. (I found this quote on a blog and haven’t been able to validate it, but it is so well put that I decided to post it) In short, it’s about the “nerve wrecking disharmonies” that the wind blowing through the web of cables produced.

By 1913, all the telephone wires in Stockholm had been put underground and the tower was left as a landmark and monument. In the 50’s, sadly, a fire in the building bellow forced it’s demolition and the towers sillhouette in the Stockholm cityscape was, in time, forgotten.

More images and information (in swedish) at the website of the telephone museum of Stockholm.

/Rutger

Proposal by Ludvig Netré and Markus Wagner.
 En 20 meter hög pyramidformad limträkonstruktion placeras på en 70×70 meter stort fundament. Programmets olika delar avgränsas genom att placeras i boxar eller genom en 1,2 meter höjdskillnad. Höjdskillnaden ger en topografi där simbassängerna är nedsänkta i förhållande till resten av markplan. 

Tre större boxar definierar interiören. En putsad box för omklädning, personal och café.  En andra box för vertikal kommunikation har en reflekterande yta av speglar. Den tredje är en högt svävande träbox som innehåller relaxavdelningen.

Takkonstruktionen är en 1,2 meter hög balkrost i limträ, limträ är ett starkt, tåligt och förnyelsebart naturmaterial. De uppemot 7 meter stora mellanrummen fylls med ETFE-kuddar som är fyllda med en konstant luftmängd. De är extremt lätta, starka, återvinningsbara och kan göras olika transparenta beroende på vädersträck.

De vinklade ytorna i taket samt ETFE-kuddarna och boxarna skapar ett rum där ljudet snabbt bryts i sin bana och goda aukustiska förhållanden kan uppnås. Luften förvärms vintertid i kulvertar längs bassängväggarna. Den stiger uppåt, sugs in vid nock och pressas nedåt genom ett schakt till källaren där det avfuktas och värmeväxlas med ny luft. Vid värmetoppar kan badhusets övre delar öppnas och badhuset kylas genom självdrag.

Det framtida hotellet placeras på tomtens norra del, den föreslagna parkeringsplatsen ersätts då av en parkering i hotellets källarplan. Badhusets placering respekterar det befintliga gatumönstret och söker förstärka Nybrovägens urbanitet. Söder om badhuset förslås en park med kullar av schaktmassor som underlag för generösa gräsytor.