Welcome to Helen Runting's PhD final seminar. Thursday 22 June 2017

Welcome to Helen Runting's PhD final seminar!

For reading material prior to the seminar, please contact Helen directly: helen.runting@arch.kth.se​

WORKING TITLE: THE STATE OF THINGS: A CRITICAL ACCOUNT OF THE ARCHITECTURAL PRESENT IN THE LATE WELFARE STATE OF SWEDEN   ABSTRACT: Issuing from within the opaque conditions of the current neoliberal moment in the late welfare state of Sweden, the twelve essays that comprise this PhD thesis aim to document a radical reorientation within the discipline of architecture. Each essay describes an architectural discipline that no longer sets its sights on “the building” per se, but rather on the production of images, diagrams, and projects. Projects, I argue, constitute powerful “container technologies” within semiocapitalism, able to hold the labor of the architect and others, to pool capital and resources, and to affectively move a host of actors into performing designed outcomes. The building is thus only one possible outcome of an architecture of the project—and perhaps, I suggest, not even a central one in a world I describe in terms of an “unbuilt environment.”
The thesis focuses on a set of emerging architectural technologies: the production of various surfaces, which stimulate flows and promote divisions in the city and its real estate infrastructure; the bounding of cells that temporarily promise to hold us ever so tightly, in place of a more facilitative environment; the images that stimulate desire for a built or unbuilt future; and the projects that lie at the heart of the contemporary mode of architectural production that I wish to describe, expose, critique, and at times, negate or transform.