Pedro Ignacio Alonso

Modellarkivet Ett vittne till staden är en tvärvetenskaplig antologi som undersöker stadens form och planering med utgångspunkt i Stockholms stadsbyggnadskontors modellsamling. Antologin utvecklar frågeställningar från filmen Modellarkivet av konstnären Malin Pettersson Öberg, som spelades in i arkivet, och från utställningen Modellarkivet som kurerades av Mikaela Steby Stenfalk på ArkDes Sveriges nationella centrum för arkitektur och design. I essäer och intervjuer reflekterar ett tiotal författare och samtalspartner över relationen mellan modell och stad, komplexiteten i stadsplaneringsprocessen, bostadsfrågan och mycket mer. Vem bygger staden och för vem? Hur förhåller sig stadens form till formen för dess invånares liv? Och kan arkivets modeller fungera som verktyg för såväl minne och historieskrivning som för att spegla och utmana den stad vi nu har? Antologin är resultatet av ett flerårigt samarbete mellan Malin Pettersson Öberg och Mikaela Steby Stenfalk.

Model Archive A Witness to the City is an interdisciplinary anthology that explores urban design and planning through the collection of models kept at the City Planning Department of Stockholm. The anthology elaborates on questions posed in the film The Model Archive by artist Malin Pettersson Öberg, and from the exhibition of the same name curated by Mikaela Steby Stenfalk at ArkDes Sweden s National Centre for Architecture and Design. In essays and conversations, a dozen authors and dialogue partners reflect on the relationship between model and city, complexities of the urban planning process, housing issues, and more. Who builds the city and for whom? How does the shape of the city relate to the shape of its inhabitants lives? And can the archive s models serve as tools for memory and historiography, as well as for reflecting and challenging the city we now have? This anthology is the result of a multi-year collaboration between Malin Pettersson Öberg and Mikaela Steby Stenfalk.

Although largely marginal within official accounts of modern architecture, during the second half of the twentieth century the development of large concrete panel systems was central to debates about architecture's modernisation and industrialisation. Through this development, not only was construction transferred from the building site to the factory floor, and manual labour succeeded by automated mass production, but political, aesthetic and ideological debates began to inscribe themselves onto the panel itself, a symbol for a whole new set of architectural values. Distributed and adapted to many different cultural, geographical and political contexts, these systems went beyond national borders in producing more than 170 million apartments worldwide. This book focuses on a particular aspect of this history, namely those systems exported from Soviet Russia into Cuba and then on to Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. Written from the point of view of the worker as much as the architect, and containing an incredible visual panoply of archival photographs, stills, cartoons, sketches and drawings, as well as oral histories from its surviving protagonists, the book offers a fascinating portrait of an architectural and political history whose symbolic and physical register all along is a concrete panel.