Journal Issues by Fredrik Torisson
Papers by Fredrik Torisson
FOOTPRINT
So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneousl... more So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneously just around the corner, already here, and yesterday’s news. This is usually put down to hype and hyperbole, but it may well be argued that smart built environments do indeed exist across temporal dimensions – only not in the way we imagine them to. Instead of speaking of a digital turn in housing, we would be better served by employing the plural: digital turns. In fact, once we begin to unravel the history of how the idea of what we today call smart technology has been implemented in multi-household rental dwellings since the early 1980s, a pattern emerges. The article charts how landlords and others have placed smart devices that monitor, encourage or discipline tenants to behave in certain ways. This is a parallel story to the dream of a leisure-centred technology-enabled house of the future. This parallel story is darker and centres on the transformation of the dwelling through its...
City, Territory and Architecture
Cities across the world are increasingly labelling themselves as smart in one way or another. At ... more Cities across the world are increasingly labelling themselves as smart in one way or another. At the same time, this smartness appears amorphous or invisible in its built urban environment. Critical researchers writing on the smart city regularly express confusion or exasperation about precisely the difficulty to locate the smart in the city. Visibility of the smart city is not a given. This article argues that visibility in the case of the smart city is instead strategically produced, and that the strategy opted for tells us something about the kind of urban imaginary put forward. The article introduces a provisional and non-exhaustive taxonomy of strategies of visibility based on analyses of three different cases of smart city projects (in Brazil, Sweden and Canada) and identifies the ways in which the smart city is made visible (or not)—symbolic presence of smart, modelling smart and ubiquitous invisible smart—and discusses what kind of city is envisioned based on each strategy.
plaNext–Next Generation Planning
'So, it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis ... more 'So, it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one. ' (Alain Badiou) The paper seeks to elaborate on the concept of hope and the possibility of a 'politics of hope' that goes beyond negation in relation to contemporary architectural practice. The focus will be on the affective modality of hope, the intra-personal, as opposed to the common understanding of hope as a personal feeling. Following Ernst Bloch's notion of hope as 'anticipatory consciousness', the paper discusses the limitations and potentials of the principle of hope in contemporary spatial practices using Brecht's dictum 'something's missing' as a starting point for thinking about hope as a cognitive instrument. In a post-modern society, the notion of an 'outside' is hardly conceivable. The alternative orders of society imagined are almost invariably mirrors of what already is; these could be called utopias of compensation. At the same time, there has over the last couple of years been a rapid increase in instances of political upheaval, and the words change and hope are heard increasingly often in political discussion, signalling a dynamism as well as an openness in political discussion that goes well beyond the ideologies of the 20th century. Hope is in other words here understood as transformative; the concept is interlinked with the prospect of change. Hope is as an operative concept capable of a double move, simultaneously being critical and propositional. The critical aspect is implicit in the connection to change; it denotes a desire for a different world than what is. The propositional aspect implies a direction and the exploration of an alternative. Hope in relation to spatial practices is thus concerned with the experimentation along the edge of the current doxai-challenging them and seeking to extend them.
Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously ... more Utopia – the word is simultaneously evocative of hope and dread. As a concept it is stupendously problematic, and yet despite its alleged passing into irrelevance, utopia still remains a household word. Why is this so?Utopia has been reduced to a category. We place a solution in the category of the utopian or, conversely, the not-utopian. Without fail, discussions involving utopia will eventually veer toward debates on whether a book, project, or building is utopian or not.Utopia reduced to such a category invokes both a problematic universality and a convoluted end of history – perhaps nowhere more so than in the field of architecture. However, if we begin with the problem to which the solution is a response rather than the solution being proposed, we soon realize that utopia is more complicated than a simple image of a perfect future.The study at hand re-interrogates the utopian concept. The question is not what architecture is utopian, but how and why architecture is utopian. Uto...
Perhaps by habit, ghosts are regularly associated with the past haunting the present; however, a ... more Perhaps by habit, ghosts are regularly associated with the past haunting the present; however, a similar case can readily be made for lost futures haunting the contemporary. This latter category – ghosts of futures that never came to be – is the subject of this essay. Twentieth century architecture envisioned grand futures for the city, but in the recent past the grandest visions arguably concern not the urban core itself, but the suburb.
The emergence of financial institutions such as the exchanges or bourses of northern Europe in th... more The emergence of financial institutions such as the exchanges or bourses of northern Europe in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries made possible the emergence of speculation in financial instruments. Speculation evolved into a game with its own logic, and the implied ethos of the speculator prioritised abstract notions and self-interest.This article investigates the relation between this ethos of speculation and architecture in this timeframe. During this period, the architecture of the exchanges transformed; what was a square with an inside at the outset gradually became an enclosed institution with representative facades toward the end of the period. The transition of the physical environment of exchange and the increasingly complex financial instruments interact, and this interaction is traced through a sequence of exchange-structures inspired by one another.The question explored is: what is the relationship between the emergence of an ethos of speculation and the archite...
Is there a neoliberalist utopian city? If there is, what does it look like? The following will de... more Is there a neoliberalist utopian city? If there is, what does it look like? The following will develop a rather narrow aspect of these admittedly broad questions, namely the relationship between the utopian potential, which arguably could be considered a central tenet in what could broadly be considered neoliberal architecture, or even capitalism itself in relation to labor power.
Anticipation and Other Affective Productions : Theorizing the Architectural Project in Action
Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Zizek
Birkhäuser Verlag, Apr 20, 2020
Urbane design concerns itself with promoting thequalities associated with the urban – dynamism, t... more Urbane design concerns itself with promoting thequalities associated with the urban – dynamism, transversal networks, etc. – in places where these do not(yet) exist. Urbane design can be considered a neoliberal off-shoot of ‘urban curating’ and other contemporary forms of extending architectural practice intothe social realm. The urbane designer is the creativemanager of the creative city, whose specific task isanimating or activating urban space.Arguing that architectural theory needs to interrogateurbane design beyond the traditional confines of architectural theory, this article addresses three different aspects of urbane design in relation to the mixeduse flagship development Studio in Malmo, Sweden.This article makes the case that urbane design playsan important part of neoliberalism’s attempt to portray itself as spontaneous, un-hierarchical and ‘natural’ and calls for a return to the underlying problemsrather than focusing solely on their solutions. It isargued that this is a...
Writing of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson locates the (postmodern) desire for architecture in its... more Writing of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson locates the (postmodern) desire for architecture in its image. Alloy- like, the architecture of the early twenty-first century amalgamates image and materi ...
Whatever happened to cybernetics in architecture? Cybernetics was swaggering from day one. Its o... more Whatever happened to cybernetics in architecture? Cybernetics was swaggering from day one. Its original mission, to predict the evasive manoeuvres of bomber pilots, soon evolved into making predictions in social systems and game theory. In the early 1960s, cybernetics began to make inroads into architecture, famously so in the never-realised Fun Palace, designed by architect Cedric Price, theatre director Joan Littlewood and cyberneticist Gordon Pask. Pask continued developed his thoughts on the uses for cybernetics in the field of architecture, and in 1969 published “The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics” (Gordon Pask, "The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics," Architectural Design , no. September, 1969). By then however, cybernetics’ moment had all but passed, and cybernetics faded into obscurity. Or, so the story goes. What if , on the contrary, cybernetics disappeared in name only , and its principles thrive architectural practices? Tiqqun’s ‘The Cybernetic H...
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Journal Issues by Fredrik Torisson
Papers by Fredrik Torisson