“You”
ArkDes, Stockholm. April-June 2019
Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019. Sept-Nov 2019
OKK+
You
- Historically, Skeppsbron has simultaneously been a place for work, commercial activity and traffic next to buildings that contained both offices and residences as well as utility spaces, magazines and rowdy bars. Today, however, Skeppsbron has become a residual public space. What once constituted the edge of the city – the limit through which it confronted the world and which made it a vibrant place full of friction – has been swallowed whole and turned into a part of a vast, smooth and isometric interior, tightly regulated but formless.
- Allemansrätten, or the “right to roam”, is a long-standing feature of Swedish society. While supported in constitutional law, its actual content is largely customary and therefore open to interpretation and debate – an active right rather than passive law that prompts a relationship to nature that is based on everyone’s right to roam without consuming or deranging. A venture into nature departing from allemansrätten is a path without a goal.
- Our proposal for Skeppsbron is an attempt at reverting its formlessness by turning it in on itself – becoming its own limit – using clear architectural elements which form voids rather than objects. In contrast to the towering postcard façades above this is an architecture of the plan, of organization. Compartmentalizing the surface by accentuating the rhythm of the façades and ships – today interrupted by the road, parking zones and the oblong pavilions – allows for a space of proximities that is devoid of function. These gestures, not small but casual, could perhaps reintroduce the friction necessary for a dynamic public sphere because their empty abstraction seem to be lacking something: you.
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