This seminar course explores the relationship between theory and practice in architecture through detailed drawings of public spaces in Stockholm, informed by field studies and observations. It includes discussions, film screenings, and guest speakers, culminating in compiled outcomes for potential exhibition or publication. The course draws on critical theories of everyday life and urbanism, emphasizing the need for skilled labor, quality of life, and the transformative potential of architectural practices.

1. Drawing Everyday Life
Tor Lindstrand
tor.lindstrand@arch.kth.se
+46 (0) 70 751 572 72

2. Drawing Everyday Life
This seminar course will have two parts, one practical and one
theoretical. Throughout the course we will question the artificial
opposition between theory and practice and seek to critically
engage with the discipline of architecture through both. The
practical part will be to make very precise and detailed drawings
of public space, based on field studies and careful first hand
observations, design, materials as well as behaviors and traces of
everyday use will hopefully provide us with in depth knowledge of
urban spaces throughout the region of Stockholm. These drawings
and observations then becomes records for a larger discussions of
the history, present and future of public space. As a support for our
discussions there will be a series of film screenings, text seminars
and invited speakers. The outcome, drawings and discussions, will
be compiled hopefully published or shown in an exhibition.

3. Subversive Surveys

4. “If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for
one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend
the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer
testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the
almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss
somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the
metaphysical concern with eternity.”
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt, 1958

6. “We need to think about what is happening around us, within us,
each and everyday. We live on familiar terms with people in our
own family, our own milieu, our own class. This constant
impression of familiarity makes us think that we know them, that
their outlines are defined for us, and that they see themselves as
having those same outlines. We define them. and we judge them.
We can identify with them or exclude them from our world. But the
familiar is not the necessarily known. “
Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre, 1947

7. What interests Henri Lefebvre’s on the subject of the everyday is
how it is orchestrated by the logic of the commodity, where life is
lived according to the rhythm of capital.
For Lefebvre this is rooted in the postwar extension of capitalism,
thoroughly penetrating the details of daily life and an inescapable
fact for everyone.
As society was reconstructed after the war, modernization became
synonymous with consumer culture. Blue jeans, electric cookers,
fridges, washing machines, Coca-cola, television was part of what
was named the “American temptation.”
However bleak Lefebvre’s view of modern everyday life became the
everyday always held out the possibility of its own transformation.

15. “…functionality is the ability to become integrated into an overall
scheme. An objects functionality is the very thing that enables it to
transcend its main ‘function’ in the direction of a secondary one, to
play a part, to become a combining element, an adjustable item,
within a universe of signs.”
System of Objects, Jean Baudrillard, 1968

24. “Festivals hold an equivocal position in the everyday: it is part of popular
everyday life but it is also a radical reconfiguration of daily life that is
anything but ‘everyday’”
“During the feasts there was much merry-making; dancing, masquerades in
which boys and girls changed clothes or dressed up in animal skins and
masks - simultaneous marriages for an entire new generation - races and
other sports, beauty contests, much tournaments. It is the day of excess.
Anything goes. This exuberance, this enormous orgy of eating and drinking
- with no limits, no rules…”
Everyday Life and Cultural Theory, Ben Highmore, 2002

25. “The most important issue is to meet the need of the business world
for skilled labour and improved communications. Another priority
task is to promote and develop Stockholm as a good city with a
high quality of life, so that the workers of the future will want to
live and work here. In an increasingly internationalized world, a
people-friendly urban environment, a rich variety of housing and
workplaces, well-developed services and a broad range of culture
and entertainment are becoming ever more important in gaining a
competitive advantage. Through this, the attractive metropolis of
Stockholm could become an even stronger brand.”
from the Comprehensive Plan for Stockholm, 2010

38. “…the neoliberal ideology do not want to seize the treasures of the
existing world, but rather those of a possible world. They conquer
neither political nor social spaces, but rather a dimension,
specifically that of social and political creativity and of the subject
of this creativity, the dimension of critique…Utopia did not simply
collapse in 1989 with Real Socialism, nor did it vanish into thin
air. We are not living, as it is often said, in a post-utopian world,
but rather in a world, in which utopia now only occurs in its
neoliberal translation.”
Boris Buden 2007

40. “I don’t care very much about building buildings. I care about
building ideas. Drawings are not only a preparation for
construction — in most cases they are the project. The act of
rendering is the making of a version of reality. If architects wish to
avoid obsolescence, they must reverse the de-politicization of
architecture by the dominance of the beautiful, but meaningless,
render. As architects, our aspirations for reality must begin in our
drawings.”
Lebbeus Woods