Building Accounts

'Building Accounts' is a study of how the changing materiality of three buildings built around 1970 in suburban Stockholm for new public social welfare services, make evident how the 'neoliberal shift' in Sweden have slowly chipped away at welfare infrastructures, physically and figuratively. The three buildings, a parklek (a public staffed playground), a public preschool and a municipal district administration office, where built in 1969, 1970 and 1971 as part of the growing welfare state and have since then changed. One of the buildings disappeared in 2009 (it was demolished), one started to smell mouldy and closed to the public in 2015, and the last changed both its use (and users), its appearance, and internal plan from the years between 2016-2021.

The study uses the notion of the 'building account' in framing a theoretical and methodological discussion on how we, through a close reading and analysis of a building 'in time', can gain a different understanding of socio-political and economic changes in society, and the socio-material consequences of these. The double-sided capacity of materials for registering something and revealing that same thing at the same time is central to the idea of the 'building account'. As a method, the thesis proposes to unpack these accounts through 'slow events', as processes where things fall apart, to understand the systems behind them better. Through the 'building accounts' of these three buildings, the thesis address how the 'neoliberal shift', as a 'slow event' over the past fifty years, has changed the inherent value of these buildings from a social value to a financial value, and its wide reaching (and often hard to see) material and social consequences. Through the three case studies, I discuss what the 'building accounts' can tell us about the individual buildings in each of their historical contexts, and how they together form a larger story of the neoliberalization of the Swedish welfare state in the last fifty years.

For a copy of the manuscript, please contact Anna Livia Vørsel at annalp.vorsel@arch.kth.se

Bio: Anna Livia Vørsel is an architectural historian, researcher, and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. She holds an MA in Architectural History and a BSc in Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies, both from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
In her work, she addresses the material, economic, bureaucratic, and social history of buildings, looking for traces of the socio-political and economic conditions, registered and stored within their materials.

Opponent: Hannah le Roux is an architect, educator and theorist. Her work revisits the modernist project in architecture, and considers how its transformation through the agency of Africa presents a conceptual model for contemporary design. Her curation of exhibitions in Johannesburg, Venice, Brussels and Rotterdam engaged with the spatialities of diaspora coffee ceremonies and the soccer culture of earth fields through design research, and designed alterations to modernist buildings and public spaces in Johannesburg.
From 2022-2023 she was Guest Professor at the gta, ETH Zurich and a Senior Fellow at Collegium Helveticum. In 2017 she was selected as a Canadian Centre for Architecture / Mellon research fellow on Architecture and the Environment, and as a Fulbright Principal Candidate for an African Research Scholarship. She was the Area Editor for Africa for the forthcoming Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture, 1960-2015.