Architecture´s Turnover: Aesthetics and Spatial Practice in the Restructing of the 1980s Welfare State
In the 1990s Sweden’s overheated property market imploded, resulting in a slew of bankruptcies and shutdowns. Architecture and building realpolitik ushered in a deep economic crisis that left Swedish society and welfare in flux. Once the cornerstone of the welfare state, architecture now played a decisive part in its demolition. How could architecture’s role have changed so dramatically? Architecture’s Turnover is a contemporary architectural history that investigates the relationship between architecture, aesthetics and the restructuring of the Swedish Model of welfare at the end of the twentieth century. In the book, architecture is not understood as limited to objects or work made by architects, but rather as assemblages of discourses including aesthetic practices, material objects, decision-making processes, design, protocols, and so forth. Architecture’s Turnover investigates the long 1980s and demonstrates that architecture and aesthetics both contributed to and was affected by neoliberalisations of the welfare state; from its beginnings in the 1968 political critique to the dismantling of the Swedish welfare state in the early 1990s. The book provides an original interpretation of how space, aesthetics, and politics converged at the end of the century. This is explored through a number of ‘sites of tensions and restructuring,’ where politics, economics, space, and aesthetics came together in the form of architecture projects and discursive figurations.
Run by Helena Mattsson
Financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond