temporary city planning office + cultural centre,

Stockholm 2009

UNCERTAIN. In the moment of turning the first spadefull of earth, architects and investors are killing the infinite amount of opportunities to realize a single one. Keeping the uncertain means keeping the freedom to change. This Project tries to carry this idea to its extremes. The site is an abandoned car park in the very centre of late-modernist Swedish suburb Tensta. Tensta is built in the most industrial way imaginable. Instead, the uncertain architecture process is not thought as a something getting closer to some final stage but as a non-linear »Partitur« with numerous spots to get in and jump across the time based planning. 
City planning is a neverending process. As the suburbian  city of Tensta shows, there neither is,  nor will there ever be a perfect city, 
master-planned by any ingenious mastermind.
A city changes and develops,  shrinks or expands, is being destroyed or extended. The city planning office should be able to do the same. The concept is to see their building not as an object but as a procedure. I do not design a final building but a plot that reveals several steps which could be skipped, extended or even be the starting point for a very different development. It is like a play or a guideline for improvisation.

A non-linear building process.

The building procedure is divided into several parts. After the achievement of every single step or the realization of every new unit, there is more than one direction to continue. Indeed this makes the building process (and the planning) much slower but provides the opportunity to insert some extra programmes.
Who cares if parts of the construction site are turned into a club that finances the rest of the building process? What would it be like, if
the sand needed for the construction, was used for an beach sports event before. Or what about having a whole building made out
of exactly those pellets that will be burned to heat the whole complex in winter, letting this builiding vanish over the time.

This process is the idea of the city planning office. To remind both,  city planners and inhabitants,  that a living city has no final design. And as long there are still citizens creating and demolishing, a city will never be dead. Et tu Tensta! 

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