The Stockholm Exhibition

For almost a year we have been working on a super interesting project in Stockholm, the remake of the famous "1930 Stockholm Exhibition" which introduced Modernism and the Swedish Welfare State. After being officially presented to the city of Stockholm, the project website was launched this week and I can finally blog about it!. The Stockholm exhibition project was initiated by our faithful Stockholm partner, the fantastic Mr Jan Aman, who together with Mr Leif Saletti put this project together, commissioned by the city of Stockholm. In a start departure from the 1930 exhibition, The Stockholm Exhibition is placed in Jarva, an uninhabited and slightly unwelcoming strech of green between the suburbs of Husby, Kista, Tensta and Rinkeby. These suburbs are typical immigrant areas, which is Stockholm are softly and invisible cut-off from anything else, and even separated from each other. The projects strategic placement tries to both adrees this larger issue while resolving an awkward piece of the larger Stockholm map.

Our job was to "design" this exhibition, but together with Jan we early on decided that "design" was really not the main issue here. We started by looking at what currently connects the suburbs surrounding Jarva, what how we could inject some energy and some pride into the landscape.We positioned attractorslit up an existing path


suggested urban grids in the fieldthought of scattered houses
and ceremonial rocks


We invited Francois Roche and R&Sie to propose something related to the idea of pavilion. In typical genius R&Sie fashion, they came up with the "Things That Necrose" pavilion, an exhibition space which essentially biodegrades
Mia Hagg together with Habiter Autrement in Paris chose the lighting path as their site, proposing an "energy pavilion" which is really a totally new way to look at energy.
Foreign Office Architects together with artist Carsten Holler came up with a Slide Tower, an infrastructural device that addresses issues such as spectacle, infrastructure and security in a manner of unique ways.
Apart from the planning research, we contributed a series of suggested structures, such as the conversion of Eggeby farmhouse into a social center, a wooden hut turned into a glass pavilion.

as generic exhibition space, a "Philosophy Farmhouse"an ISO Stack, a pavilion made out of the remaining ISO boxes which the exhibition would use during construction.

Our "official" pavilion is Dolmen, a social space organized under a magnified dolmen structure
perhaps on a plinth





and finally this, which might even get built after all these years (and on the occasion made it to the cover of Forum magazine in Stockholm)
For more info on the exhibition, visit http://www.stockholmexhibition.com/ , download the planning research PDF from here and the storyline PDF from here

More collaborations to be announced soon