Summerland – Stockholm is our pleasure park

17 March – 13 May

With its starting point in the city’s nature, the explorative project ‘Summerland’ is a concept for a pleasure park with new types of attractions, realised within the framework of the Swedish Museum of Architecture’s Project Room. Assuming the roles of designers and coordinators, Byggstudio’s long-term intention is for the project to result in a series of public events in Stockholm’s public countryside.

 

In the Project Room, a place for exploration and discussion is being created, and in the course of eight weeks, the project’s conceptual landscape with models, texts and images will be developed, including a public programme of meetings and excursions. The result of the research will be presented in a publication.

 

“We would like to create a new form of pleasure park with activities and venues that we think should be part of our city. We believe that Stockholm’s parks have the potential to take on a more educational and poetic role, including exhibition spaces, stages and meeting places where one can focus on new expressions and ideas. The countryside and parks are open for everyone and are thus able to communicate with different types of resident groups.

 

Historically, the content and environments of parks and pleasure parks expressed an imaginative contrast to the everyday. They were designed as a form of ideal place, framed by walls or fences to keep reality out in an attempt to reinforce the feeling of temporarily being in another world. Initially, only royalty and the upper classes had access to these parks but during industrialisation parks became public and provided an important escape from the city environment for people from all walks of life. They were places for encounters and pleasure, scenes for socialising, as well as important venues for adult education and edification. Skeppsholmen, where Arkitekturmuseet is located, was long called Lustholmen (Pleasure Island) as it was used by the King and the Court for pleasure activities at a convenient distance from the Palace in the Old Town.

 

With the project Summerland we want to raise questions about how we utilise our common park spaces and what they can look like today. Which ideals and values do parks give the city dwellers today?”

 

Hanna Nilsson och Sofia Østerhus, Byggstudio

 

 

 

Byggstudio

 

Byggstudio is a Swedish-Norwegian creative consultancy based in Stockholm and Oslo. It was founded in Copenhagen in 2006 by graphic designers Hanna Nilsson and Sofia Østerhus after graduating from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design. Working with graphic design and concept-orientated design, Byggstudio’s work is characterised by a curious, playful and open approach in which personal and parallel stories are often emphasised. Each project is preceded by research, which is important for how the result is shaped with regard design and function. Communicating a central concept is the starting point rather than the choice of media. Byggstudio’s commercial and cultural commissions tend to revolve around the founder’s particular interests: people, nature, food and history. Byggstudio has previously participated at the Swedish Museum of Architecture in the project ‘48 timmar’ (48 Hours) in 2011.

 

 

The Project Room

 

The Project Room is a new exhibition format at the Swedish Museum of Architecture. Our aim is to introduce a new, experimental program focused primarily on aspects of design and crafts, but also linked to adjacent fields like architecture and urban planning. We want to offer our audience an opportunity to discover what is happening in these fields, and gain an insight into how and where designers, craftspeople, architects and others work. We envisage the Project Room as an environment for developing different forms of presentation and discussion, in which visitors can play an active part in these processes and meet practitioners and contexts in new ways. The Project Room will contain a wide range of ‘exhibits’, from presentations of completed projects to on-going work carried out in situ. With its varied programme and meeting formats, the Project Room is intended as a place where everyone, of whatever age or level of knowledge, is welcome.

 

‘Sommarland’ is the third presentation within the Project Room at the Swedish Museum of Architecture, 17 March – 13 May. Previous project was Fashionplay (7 – 26 February 2012) and OpenSloyd by Otto von Busch (5 November – 18 December 2011).