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
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Posted: October 30th, 2009
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Arkitektur,
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framtiden,
Pallets
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New magazine “Cities the magazine” kicked of the production of their first issue with a workshop held this monday at gallery Detroit (Roslagsgatan 21, Stockholm).
The magazine will focus on different urban conditions and peculiarities around the world and the staff are constantly looking for new contributors. From the website:
“We don’t want to hand you a tourist guide.
We don’t want to show you the last renderings of the best architects.
We don’t want to provide the latest trends and design concepts.
We don’t want to update you on the current fashion weeks and art openings.
We want to speak about cities.”
So, if you are interested in breaking up the printed intellectual monoculture of Sweden, write a great piece about cities and send it to them or simply visit their website at www.citiesthemagazine.com and get the first issue when it gets released.
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Posted: March 12th, 2009
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(To the right, Joel Jouannet is counting votes. Next to him, the winning proposal)
When the snow falls heavily on the streets of Stockholm, turning instantly into grey sticky sleet, it is nice to be able to write about some good things that are happening in the city.
Last wednesday the first round of International Architectural Battle was fought at the School of Architecture and some of us from Svensk Standard were lucky enough to be competing. Organized by Joel Jouannet, as a part of his masters thesis, the concept of the battle is simple yet exciting.
There are four teams, one site/task and one hour to produce a material that will be presented during three minutes, then the audience decide who the winner will be.
The battle was fierce and the audience ecstatic. The hall was filled with all kinds of weird energies and the resulting proposals were visionary to say the least. But what was really interesting was all that happened before the projects were presented and the winner was chosen. The architects usually hidden behind a desk or a computer screen became performers and suddenly architecture was all about joy and happiness. Maybe it was because of the beer or maybe it was because there simply is no time to be boring when you only have an hour to produce(/perform).
In the end activities like this are badly needed in Stockholm and it’s great to be reminded that architecture really is about having fun.
Visit the website at http://internationalarchitecturalbattle.blogspot.com
(Oh, by the way, we won)
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Posted: March 11th, 2009
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A manifesto for the new economy.
Not a lot has been happening on Svensk Standard in the last months and for that we apologize. Since we’ve all been full-time practicing architects the last nine months, there hasn’t been much time for updates or independent productions. Global recession, however, is about to change all that and as our employers ask us if it would be possible for us to work part-time to ease the losses (perhaps we’ll even lose our jobs) we reply:
Hell yeah!
I know, recession is hitting hard on a lot of people right now, it’s no joking matter. It’s been tearing around the financial sector for half a year, the auto industry (Saab, we’ll miss you) is going down and by now it has spread out practically everywhere.
The architectural professions are usually among the first to suffer; when there is no money the first thing to get cancelled are those fancy new headquarters or those cool sofas you were gonna get for your living room. The clients stops calling and the architects get really moody. Because when there is a recession nothing happens.
But that is all wrong. This is when all the great things happen.
No one does anything exiting when the economy is doing well. When all that money is spinning around. We get employed, we get lazy. We go to our different offices and sit down at our desks, turn on the computer, open up outlook and wait for what the day will bring or what kind of interesting project the next phone call will offer.
Aesthetics and thought seem to suffer as well during the boom. When everything is happening super fast no one has time for reflection and great potential is reduced to cheesy one-liners (this one is for you Bjarke). Even worse, those cheesy one-liners seem to the rest of us to be viable solutions. For a moment we actually thought that stacking all those small apartments in cliché shapes of mountains or zigzag ridges were cool. And an entire generation of architecture students (and offices that’ve been around for a while but wants to freshen up their image) will now waste their energy speaking in shallow punch lines instead of searching deep as they should be. And if you were ever to criticize it, some one will say “but what about the boring stuff that you are creating?” or “just because you have a weblog with a punk name doesn’t mean you can debase others who are actually BUILDING their work”.
In general, that seems to be the most frequent argument promoting this kind of architecture – that it got built – especially in Sweden. Since the common stuff that’s produced here is of such poor quality the slightest break in this tedious flow is considered art. And the excuse is always: “Well, at least they’re doing something”. As if the real judge of our work isn’t our own full potential but the laziness of our peers.
We’re all guilty. We got carried away, got fat and lazy. No point in pushing the blame around anymore. The boom is over. But already, great things are happening.
The reason is simple. The obstacle that Paul Virilio once wrote about, the one that would unite the pacified inhabitants of our modern cities in struggle, has been found and it turned out it wasn’t a wall. Not even sloping plane.
We don’t have anything to lose anymore. We’ve hit rock bottom and the only way is up.
And what a sweet ride it will be!
Svensk Standard / Rutger
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Posted: March 3rd, 2009
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framtiden
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