City of My Dreams
2018
Exhibition
Stockholm

City of my Dreams was a commisioned contribution for the exhibition Architecture Projects: Skeppsbron at Arkdes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design.

‘Mina drömmars stad’ or ‘City of My Dreams’ is a borrowed title from Per Anders Fogelström’s 1960 novel that gives a voice to Stockholm’s working class at the turn of the last century. As a work by someone who carefully researched yet unwritten histories, it reflects our own intention to acknowledge the multitude of narratives that define the city and to present a view, or a way of seeing, that projects these narratives into a field where the physical, the imagined, the historical and the remembered exist simultaneously.

A collection of personal narratives originate a series of public programs that are situated within the field as new civic architectures in such a way as to engage, enhance and orient specific relationships within it.

For example - A casual description of a memory evoked by a pastry bag recalls a shopkeeper as he takes off his watch, listens as he winds it, cleans its face and puts the watch back on his wrist again. This voyeuristic memory originates a voyeuristic architecture that is both a watch tower for watching the city, and a clock tower for the city to watch. It reflects the existing facade of Kvarteret Python (Skeppsbron 16) and frames a proposed square within the building fabric of the site. The physical, the imagined, the historical and the remembered are collected in three books that present three archives; memory things (the personal narratives), site and “thing-architectures”.



Images : Johan Dehlin