The Swedish Museum of Architecture is tasked with preserving and using our heritage.
It is important for us to maintain a critical stance and to reappraise our methods of
collection and interpretation, as well as to develop new forms of presentation. To this
end the museum has invited the editors of MAMA to present their own historiography,
based on the museum archives. Illustration: Anna Odlinge.
MAMA’s remit included offering new angles of approach, viewing the collection
through different eyes. The editors have cut an arbitrary tranche from the mass of material in the archive, presented in the first part of the exhibition. Here
visitors can compile their own inventory of some of the content of the museum’s
collections.
The second part of the exhibition consists of eight individual commentaries on what
the archive contains and does not contain, plus a future scenario of what the archive
may come to look like in the digital age.
Individual commentaries
Read about the future scenario and one of the individual commentaries.
The real
Buildings change over time. What lives on, however, unchanged, is the photograph. Indeed, most of what we know about architecture comes through media rather than direct experience. Hötorgscity in Stockholm was chosen as an object of study, selected primarily for the rich and di-verse collection of photographs to be found in the Museum’s archive. Moreover Hötorgscity is one work of architecture that most everyone has visited, which gives us the unusual opportunity of comparing a range of images with our own personal experience, and allows us to ponder how we know a building as a work of architecture: Do the buildings themselves make their own case, or is it the images that show us (or create) their architectural worth? Text and photo: Michael Perlmutter.
The limitless
How will a museum of architecture relate to an architecture which no longer consists primarily of concrete, wood and glass, but to no less an extent comprises virtual environments, communication and adaptive processes? The ARKDOK 2.0 installation conveys a vision of an archive in the year 2025. By that time, the museum archive will be directly linked to architects’ offices, buildings and construction sites by digital links. Text: Igor Isaksson and Beeoff. Illustration: Tomas Linell/Beeoff.
