Architectural Footnotes

Abstract: In this work I have been looking at three small everyday sites that can tell big and unexpected stories of how we live together. These sites appear unremarkable at first glance, but on a second look are filled with contradictions and conflicts of interest. I speculate that these marginalised sites operate like “architectural footnotes” helping break the tempo, rhythm and tone of the city while expanding the scope of the narrative beyond the local and specific reading. I’m interested in how we can make sense of the city and critique it in a meaningful way when it appears so fragmented and seems impossible to define in single terms. I have been testing different approaches ranging from surveying, counting, measuring and mapping, to model making, interviews, drawing, film-making and texts. I have been interested in how these diverse methods can help me understand the city in different ways and what they do when used together.In part one: A Fence I investigate a trend towards the increasing enclosure of private courtyard/gardens and the severing of established pathways that are incredibly important for navigating the area. This led to questioning how ground-floor habitation, different forms of tenure, and regulation, affects public access and passage in the area.In part two: A Drinking Fountain I attempted to map the defunct drinking fountains in Stockholm and trace the origin of their (ubiquitous) design. Instead of finding fountains, however, I found a vacuum of responsibility, and questions were raised around why some infrastructures are more important than others and how shared/societal needs seem to have been increasingly privatised. In part three: Some Planting I looked at a recently built area of “urban-community-farming” in the middle of local park. Here tensions between the public, private and common are brought to the fore, questioning how attempts towards more local and participatory democratic processes affect rights of access to, and use of, public spaces, around flexibility and durability, and how we balance short term demands with long term visions.When seen together these “footnotes” can describe a trend towards withdrawal of the state and municipality through the dismantling of infrastructures, deregulation and outsourcing, resulting in an increasingly individualistic and privatised city. This is perhaps unsurprising in itself, but the work that comes out of these sites has helped reveal (to me at least) some of the surprising ways in which this has happened and continues to do so (albeit in different forms) and how this affects the ways in which we inhabit the everyday city.