CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

This study is funded by the Swedish Research Council and runs 2023–2025. The study posits that student housing differs from housing in significant ways and explores student housing as a building typology. Its purpose is to develop understanding of the interrelations between student housing design and the university, city and socius. The aims are to: 1) map the development of Swedish student housing nationally, a field thus far uncharted; 2) better understand the interrelation between student housing and social, political, financial, ideological and material influences. The study will primarily investigate archival material: architectural drawings and other project documents. Research will be conducted over a three-year period, initially focusing on a detailed overview of as many student housing projects from the period as possible. It will later entail detailed studies of selected projects that challenged contemporary norms in their design or function.

The study will address the following questions:
1) By whom was student housing constructed and why?
2) Who was included in/excluded from student homes?
3) What architectural means were used to manage inhabitants; why?
4) How has the relationship between student housing projects and their cities developed?

As society sets out to construct large numbers of student housing units once again, we must take the opportunity to learn from how earlier generations addressed the same endeavor. A historical perspective enables us identify and alter prejudices and discrimination that have remained pervasive.

In his short essay “Rom: Eine äestetische Analyse” originally published in Die Zeit 1898, sociologist Georg Simmel focuses on Rome, and more precisely on the relationship between the singular historical object and the unintentional but nevertheless fantastic whole in which every historical object is inscribed into. Simmel notes that the focus on each historical object promotes an understanding of the whole as the sum of its parts. As a result, the whole becomes overlooked as something other than the sum of its parts. This, according to Simmel is highly problematic: it produces a comprehension of the body as the sum of its anatomical parts together making up life, without considering the relation between the parts or their interplay.

RTR departs from Simmel’s observations and will attempt to develop an understanding for precisely this whole in relation to a specific but highly complex edifice: Roma Termini. This is a building often atomized into its distinctive and sometimes contradictory parts, a building that, as a whole, has grown over time and which, just like Rome in Simmel’s view, is regularly viewed as a collection of parts rather than accounting for the functional whole. The question underpinning the study can be formulated as follows: How can we understand Roma Termini as a composite whole?

The proposed project will be discussing Roma Termini as a whole and parts. Simmel’s observations form the basis for the project, but in order to develop the question, I will relate to the theories of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who has written extensively on parts and wholes, and his philosophy appears highly promising in relation to the project. Of particular interest is Simondon’s thought around the relations and of the whole as something other than the sum of something’s parts.

The whole is here understood, as Canadian philosopher Brian Massumi puts it with reference to Simondon, not as the parts, but alongside them, or in addition to them. It is here not considered a hylomorphic whole, but rather understood in terms of effects. The parts in relation and interplay produce effects that may be considered different from the sum of the parts. Simondon’s notion of an “operational solidarity” between the parts here becomes central to the analysis of Roma Termini as a whole.

The hypothesis of the project is that something is lost if we understand Roma Termini predominantly as a series of instances from architectural history, and that the analysis of the station complex as a functional whole may provide a different perspective and different knowledge.

Introduction

Departure is from the proposition that there is no a priori concept of privacy. From this follows that there is no single, correct definition of privacy; we are instead able to focus on the practices and spatial arrangements that have been organized around what is assumed to be privacy. Furthermore, we can begin thinking of privacies in plural, which includes notions of privacy that have been dispensed with over the course of the history. So, rather than begin with privacy itself as a universal or a given, I propose to start with how privacy is enacted in the idea(l)s of built environment, actual and imagined.

Initial Hypotheses

The hypotheses of the proposed research project are:

i.) There is no such thing as a universal concept of “privacy.”

ii.) There are multiple practices related to something supposed to be privacy.

iii.) Within the historical span of the proposed project, the notion of privacy was less transfixed than at present; privacy can be considered to have been in formation.

iv.) This would suggest that there are other notions and concepts of privacy, privacies, that did not directly come to inform what we call privacy today.

A General Approach

While privacy today has taken on a relatively uniform meaning – although still ambiguous in terms of right/threat – the project proposed here will attempt to analyse the period when this definition was still open and in formation, and focus on the possible other concepts of privacy that, colourfully put, were weeded out and left by the side of the road that is general historiography. In other words, I propose to explore the multiple facets of what privacy represents, rather than what it is assumed to mean.

The early modern period was a period in which humankind in western Europe came to the conclusion that they ruled their own destiny, and that the order of society was a human, rather than a divine, affair. This realization in turn enabled us to interrogate and consider the order of society in greater depth and to question its organization in different ways. On the one hand, the state becomes, as Foucault hesitantly puts it, “self-conscious,” setting out to develop the art of governance, and where the relation between state and its subjects becomes political, and treatises outlining a social contract influence the conception of sovereignty. At the same time, this was also the era of dreaming large, of utopias and proposed ideal societal organizations, proposing other types of social contracts, other forms of societal order, and, sometimes, other notions of privacy, manifested in other forms of proposed and constructed architecture. It is these other privacies that the project proposed here aims to bring to put the spotlight on and bring in dialogue with present notions of privacy.

For more information, see the Privacy Centre website