A dialogue between Caroline Mårtensson/Patrik Bengtsson and architect Lars Fridén, based on reflections made in connection with the work process presented together with images, maps, material samples and drawings.
Steninge, 19 February 2023
As practitioners of artistic professions, we have spent many years searching for a combined living and working environment. We’ve pondered what this environment would consist of and what such a transformed environment would mean for us. From the beginning, it was mostly about inspiring environments, work surfaces, and function, but the surroundings also demanded something else, a different kind of reflection and responsibility in relation to intimately understanding a place. Questions about how we handle the knowledge we have taken with us through our professional paths and also about the necessary adjustment required of us all.
The act of building often has, in our part of the world, significant and negative impacts on climate. At the same time, there is an unceasing demand for more places to live. The equation is impossible to balance.
What are our true needs, and what do we need to re-evaluate? We have lived the first half of our lives in a time when development has proceeded at record speed and in which people’s demand for “quality of life” has constantly increased, reaching impossible heights.
A thought arose and took hold. If we attempted to create a place to live in harmony with nature (is that even possible?), couldn’t we do this in a way that enabled us to share our experiences with others? To create a Test Site for practical experiments and the exchange of knowledge?
/Patrik & Caroline
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Varberg, 21 February 2023
Scrolling to no avail through the internet in search of a picture of the jars made by Steninge Glassworks (1874-1917). Apparently, sand from Steninge beach was only used for their greenish-brown glass. To produce pharmaceutical bottles and glass for household uses and window panes, sand of better quality was brought up from Skåne. The land near the sea where the factory was built was acquired by Alfred Bexell.
I’m not going to dwell on my own wavering return to Halland, but his name rings a bell. The farm north of Varberg where I grew up, the farm where I now write this to you, was taken over in the late 1800s by one of the tenants Bexell banished when his “land-hunger” drove him to take over the meager archipelago farm on the island of Balgö. The rootless farmers are still called Balgö Migrants if you go knocking at the right door. I used to paddle out that way in the early summer when the natterjack toads, formerly known in Sweden as ‘stink toads’–they’re more punk than beach, so their new name, which translates to ‘beach toad’, is a poor fit–crawl forth from the remains of Bexell’s marlpits and ditches in order to croak loudly at dusk. I often let my gaze wander off toward one of the barns he built, where the same light hits the uneven surfaces of the brick-framed windows. The panes probably come from one of the glass furnaces in Steninge.
What does this digression have to do with your desire to live in harmony and to find yourselves in reciprocal exchange with a place?
In an architecture and through a practice of using the landscape in a way that both opens up and brings together, rather than constraining and claiming?
The wish for a responsible adjustment as you describe resembles the ideological currents that marked previous social reforms. Shifts that demanded and continue to demands careful negotiation, specification, and thorny position-taking. Whereas for Bexell, who earlier pushed the issue of universal voting rights in Parliament, it was obvious that his need for more land was more important than a crofter’s, that it was not possible to be satisfied with the quality of glass that was produced from local sand, that the natterjack toad’s habitat was subordinate to the conditions of rational agriculture, you formulate radically different answers and positions. They interest me.
If we start with the place itself. What local relationships have you and your house gotten entangled in here?
/Lars
[When I reflect on historical shifts and adjustments, it is a broad line of thought that involves, for example, the establishment of the social contract, the ownership and use of land, the view of the relationship between work and free time, the efficiency of industry and the conditions of productions, the influence of democracy, the construction of buildings, as well as the materiality and interplay between nature and culture. All of this is reflected in the houses we build.]
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Steninge, 23 February 2023
Searching through drawers among sketches, bits of ideas, and reference material–somewhere here there is a product catalog from the glory days of the glassworks. Throughout the material that I dig through, it becomes so clear, the connections throughout life. Between professional paths, people, and places. Today, there are signs on the beach that tell of the risk of walking barefoot in certain areas. Like many other industries that developed during this time, waste was dumped near the place of production.
The glass in the greenhouse isn’t from here, nor is the glass for the hothouse that stood on the southern slope for carnation cultivation before the oil crisis of the 1970s. The fruit and carnation industry in Grottelyckan provided work for many of the area’s residents and came to characterize the landscape in this region. Now, our house stands on a piece of this land and borders the small part that remains today, which we lease. The trees are old and don’t produce a lot of fruit, but they are part of the cultural landscape and provide food and habitat for many other species.
The concept of a place’s identity and its different layers is something we are interested in. What things are dependent on the place’s structures and systems in the moment, how has it looked historically, and what comes after? How can we better cooperate with the ecosystem we are a part of? Maybe it requires us to listen to our surroundings in a different way than has been the norm in the past 100 years? Land-hunger is even more all-encompassing and complex today.
It is said that of all areas in Sweden, Steninge is most densely covered with earthen houses. Clay has been dug up from the plains and houses were built from it in cycles starting in 1920. The last was built in the neighborhood surrounding the parish church in 2006. Clay was used primarily because it was cheap and local. It required intensive labor, yes, but it was accessible. When the latest batch of houses was built, the circumstances weren’t the same as during the 1920s. The construction materials today are also relatively cheap but are transported a long distance, and labor and time have become the highest cost. For a building process to prioritize needs and material selection in a way that promotes health and the environment is often seen as too demanding of time and cost.
New building codes put a stop to earthen house production. Instead, through Hans Bulthuis–experienced custodian of historic buildings and craftsman who has built several earthen houses and also one of the first hemp-and-lime houses in Sweden–our eyes were opened to industrial hemp. Hemp is a plant that can be produced locally and that has many areas of use. Its protein-rich seeds are used for oil and food products, the fiber for rope and textiles. It is an option as a catch crop and is a soil improver for fields, and the final waste product can be used as an effective insulating material for building construction.
The greenhouse returned to the site for other reasons. Unheated but as a weather barrier within which it is possible to experiment with other types of materials, but also other activities. It is similar to how large houses were previously used, where the great room was often closed during the winter months but the residents and activities would spread out to a different extent during the summer months. The six warm months in the greenhouse-enclosed Naturhus (Nature House) actually become closer to nine. The season is extended and it is more like a Mediterranean climate.
/Patrik & Caroline
[Found the compendium from Steninge Glassworks AB: Pris-Courant over Steninge Glassworks’ Production of Flat, Polished, and Pressed Glassware, 1876. Here we can find out about the exclusive production that occurred 1876-1880, along with sketches of both elegant faceted glass and vessels such as inkpots, flycatchers, and schnapps glasses. The glassworks, according to Sweden’s Industry- and Agriculture-Meeting Catalog from 1880, held the silver medal for its window glass and glass products, etc., which were seen to be of a “good and beautiful fabrication.”
In the publication from the glassworks, there is nothing about how sand was brought in.]
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Varberg, 28 February 2023
I am going to write about the film Ghostbusters. But not yet. The complexity of land-hunger has definitely changed over the past hundred years. The same is true of the production chain for construction materials, the structure of building codes, and the chains of goods that each individual building today is part of. Just as you describe. All of these economic equations for how we, our dwellings, and our architecture should be stimulated in order to gallop off in economic value don’t match with the ecological, cultural-historical, and socially-balanced stewardship of a place. Maybe they never have. To build in a way that renounces that logic is more or less impossible. Yet I believe that it is crucial that we stubbornly dig in our heels.
The often-cited and clichéd quote “architecture is frozen music” or “frozen ideology” incites me. For me, and I think for you, too, architecture is a spatial answer that arises from a variety of diverse and ongoing currents that weave together temporality, materiality, surroundings, history, ecology, aesthetics, economy, social situations, and much more. It is ongoing. Like an active spiderweb rather than an ice cube. Sending here a quote to accompany what I’m writing now. From the anthology Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. In the introduction, they present the ghosts in a way that I find incredibly charming:
The winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts–the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present. This book offers stories of those winds as they blow over haunted landscapes. Our ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade. (ed. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt, 2017.)
The text calls forth ghosts from rips in historically unhealthy relationships between us and our surroundings and interprets them in order to identify creative spaces where we can exist more reciprocally. Using without exploiting. In and with the history, ecological systems, other species, and what currently exists, but without getting bogged down in nostalgic sentimentality. Much of what we write about can be seen as attempts to embrace this sort of ghost and afflicted landscape: the glass shards on the beach, Grottelyckan’s greenhouse, insects in the remaining fruit trees, the stinky toads, earthen houses, hemp, …
I don’t mean to force you into believing in ghosts but I imagine your greenhouse like ghostbusters in the films. But in contrast to Dan Akroyd’s extermination goal, you focus in, illuminate, listen, and reformulate the ghosts you encounter into architecture that carefully takes care of their experiences. I’ve painted myself into a corner with this comparison, so I might as well continue. In the film, they develop certain weapons and instruments in order to observe and get rid of the ghosts: like ecto-goggles, slime-blowers, and proton packs. I think we have to take the same approach, constructing tools and developing methods that allow us to better recognize historical and ecological connections and that help us to reformulate them into more responsive architecture.
Never got around to the actual greenhouse. Remind me.
/Lars
[The parallel with ghosts is abstract. But our relationship to history, how it lives on with us and how we take care of it, is more complicated and more diffuse than we allow it to be, and those ghosts help me perceive the complexity. Where I grew up, there is a crooked birch tree that my grandparents planted. I used to climb around in it and at one point hammered a treehouse into it. A green woodpecker took over the tree for a time, along with moss and a crowd of black ants. Assar, a tailless cat, once used the birch as a ladder to sneak in through the attic window. The tree grows. It contains stories, both temporary and long-reaching; it gives life to other species, to sounds, and more. It continues to grow. But we observe only a scant few of these traces and ghosts. We appreciate even fewer of them. Imagine now that that birch tree is your house.]
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Steninge, 3 March 2023
In the early spring, the landscape is barren. The sun has been out a few days in a row, and we are searching for signs of spring. Buds swelling, drowsy bees buzzing outside the hive in search of food. Goat willow and hazel begin to bud out, the occasional spring onions planted in sunny spots. But today, the morning haze does not want to release its grip.
We’re walking along the gravel road and there, parallel to us a couple of meters in, barely discernible in the greyish brown landscape with the day’s limited visibility, we can make out wear from people, cloven hooves, and claws that wandered here long before us.
These sunken roads are difficult to date. The vestiges of our forefathers have been healed over by the landscape around us. In the Swedish National Heritage Board’s Fornsök, a database of information about various archeological features, we find that the path ends in both directions in what used to be cropland, the continuation toward the north-northwest and south-southwest has been erased through cultivation. A couple hundred meters away is a wooded meadow with traces of ancient use, an incredibly beautiful area protected by Naturvårdskontrakt, a contract between the landowner and the National Board of Forestry or the County Administration that dictates how the land should be cared for. A trained eye can make out terraces of cultivation and lines of cleared stone. The agriculturally-minded can read the land use from the trimmed trees. Here and there is a tree that grew after the stone walls were constructed, so the formations can be approximately dated using the age of the tree.
One of the oldest forms of natural protection in Sweden is the Naturminne designation, signifying a special “natural artifact” that requires a particular type of care or protection, and that in many cases has great significance for the conservation of biological diversity. Characteristic of this type of natural protection is that it should be an individual piece of nature, such as an old tree with rich flora and fauna, but the protection can also comprise the land area that is required to preserve the tree and give the necessary space. What is needed to protect our shared home?
The other day, the tawny owl called out again. They are here year-round, but they are most active in the spring and fall when their hooting, announcing to others where their territory lies, not unlike the sound from the sheet ghosts of our childhood, is again heard in the neighborhood. In times past, the tawny owl was the subject of many myths–speculations that died off when we began to understand more about our ecological context.
/Patrik & Caroline
[If the well-worn sunken roads are still visible, how violent will the exploitation by our present day look in the future? These scars people leave after themselves in the landscape that Anna Tsing calls ghosts–our scraping, dumping, our careless actions toward our surroundings. Maybe we need to find other forms for our storytelling, other epithets, in order to be able to understand and change our direction?]
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Varberg, 18 March 2023
The tawny owls that nested here when I was a child are no longer around. On paper, we are able to live together, but for some reason, the owls grew tired of the company and moved on. Maybe it became too difficult for them to find food, maybe we diverted the fresh water, maybe the influx of homeowners was too quick and too close, maybe the last hollowed-out tree trunk where they could live was chopped down. None of this was recorded on any of the many environmental impact assessments that have been written here in recent years. The explanation for the disappearance of the barbastelle bat that previously lived in the walkways under Varberg fortress is simpler. Light, light, and more light made their existence there unbearable. Fewer lamps, pointed in a different direction, and they could have remained.
The reliance on the house as a junction box or a system has been cultivated based on various architectural horizons from the 1900s. From the constantly adaptable space that was formed and re-formed in dialogue with changing social patterns and lifestyle habits to a mechanical approach in which the building’s various parts–conduits and pipes–can easily be swapped out when they have finished playing their part, and on to a cybernetics in which human and house are merged into a programmable series of automated functions where the architecture comprised the operating system itself.
When architect Bengt Warne drafted Naturhuset, the Nature House, in Saltsjöbaden in the 1970s, he was primarily designing a circular and energy-efficient system. Responsible, aware, and independent rather than co-existing. The human continues to sit comfortably reclined in the center of existence, and I have a hard time identifying any more sharply defined ecological connections. His book was on your kitchen table the first time I visited you. Liberated from its time, that house quickly solidifies into a symbol for a rising environmental movement where the gaze has been lifted so that we observe the ecological contexts you write about and understand that we are part of them. But the perspective has still not shifted. In the light of the ecological and climatic catastrophe we find ourselves in today, Naturhuset inspires me more as a first fumbling attempt to move in a truly sustainable direction. Not as a polished solution but a bit of yarn for us, the tawny owl, and the barbastelle to persistently unravel further.
I remember (but just barely) a lecture about the different zones in a Samian tipi and how the use of them changes depending on season, daily chores, and climate. It is seductively simple to romanticize nomadic cultures and to run off with ideas of a cleaner, more open, more original relationship with nature. I don’t mean to get lost in that journey, yet I think that there is a seed there. Yet another way to see architecture as a system in which several parameters and scales are integrated–outside/inside, seasons, the living conditions of other species, sheet ghosts, and many more. Somewhere in this complicated mess is where I think Bengt Warne would have found himself today. And is where you find yourself.
Don’t want to use the term “ecosystem service.”
/Lars
[...Naturhuset is valued today at around 10 million SEK (about 1 million USD). None, or incredibly few, of the architects who were fascinated by system thinking counted on architecture as a static aesthetic object and the housing market as an evaluation system would come to dominate so completely over functionality and responsiveness in the future. The latter qualities have simultaneously been absorbed by an almost hypercommercialized form of architecture in which flexibility and lightning-fast adaptability for renters is a driving force of profits.
Don’t know if this should be part of it. I’ve probably written enough about economics.]
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Steninge, 26 March 2023
A more original relationship with nature, that is, to all living things and all systems that hold together our existence, is a worthwhile pursuit, but perhaps no longer possible? We have grown so far away over such a long time. Urbanization, and maybe especially the possibility of the life it brought with it, has been desirable. But in the aftereffects of a pandemic, in relation to a war that few thought was possible, and as the consequence of a changed climate, this life becomes vulnerable. Perhaps it even leads to a questioning of this existence on a personal plan as well. Somewhere there, where the necessary conditions for a person and their loved ones become tenuous, a reaction often occurs.
The individual residence in the country is not the solution, even if it provides space for working with nature to a greater degree. But if we, when planning for city and country development, employed methods to retain the robustness intrinsic in nature, we would stand more firmly and with other species with us. A shared characteristic of both residential and commercial buildings is the absence of this approach. The concept of ecosystem services is problematic–a positive in that it gives us tools for seeing which nature-based solutions we have to work with, but a negative in that this occurs from the perspective of exploitation by humans. There is a general need for increased knowledge about how all of this hangs together, knowledge of ecological systems and how we need to see and plan our future jointly with other species and so-called “natural resources.” All of this to change the dystopian course we have been following.
There is an expression, extinction of experience, about the widespread loss of experience in relation to interactions with nature. This development needs to be turned around, and one way to do this could be to get to know the ecological systems in one’s own surroundings, which species exist in close proximity and which ones we probably share some needs with.
Habitats for bats are limited by light pollution, which is also true for many of the nocturnal insects that are drawn to light sources. Either they fall victim to predators or they buzz around in the glow until they can’t take it anymore. If we look at humans (for us, it is so difficult to see beyond ourselves as a species), our metabolisms, too, are disturbed by the wrong light conditions.
One evening at the tipping point between late summer and early fall, we set up an experiment to study owlet moths with the help of powerful lamps. Instead of the sheet that is often used as a collecting surface, we mounted the light within a tent-like structure. It was still a little too early for the nocturnal insects to come out, and instead, huge giant hornets thundered toward the cloth. They were drawn to the bright light and became completely disoriented. Many species orient themselves by the moon and other bright celestial bodies in order to find their way, and what was now happening was that their world was being turned upside down. Like drunken creatures, they tumbled around on the cloth, incapable of going on their way.
/Patrik & Caroline
[Several of the bat species that live in Sweden have not been inventoried by sight but are instead identified through sounds. For bats, sound is their sight and if we see, or rather listen, from their perspective, it does not seem as strange for us to know them via their sounds.]
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Varberg, 19 April 2023
Haven’t run into that concept before. It resonates with me, extinction of experience. I want to turn it inside out, re-cast it as a challenge. Encapsulate experience here, or mandatory insertion of experience on the dotted line. Classify it as an obligatory shortcut command in all drafting programs that architects use.
The lack it points out is so obvious in architecture. That the experiences we and other species carry, where time, our surroundings, and everything that moves is not encapsulated in how we produce or see a building or a planned environment. That we are lacking the research laboratory of Ghostbusters and methods that can convert a site-specific inquisitive listening process and other ways of observing our immediate surroundings into flexible instructions for how we build and inhabit.
The architectural-historical and architectural-theoretical reference points that I’m peppering you with amplify this emptiness. We can choose an authentic historical condition upon which we can then evaluate what we build, almost like an answer key. We can identify a relationship or a system that we actively integrate in an architectonic grip but become passive when we are forced to relate to a more complex understanding of all of the intertwined and variable connections that buildings hold. We can construct but not respond. Can’t argue with experience.
It makes me think of all this with the glass house, Naturhuset. The symbolism it brings with it also has a long tradition: Crystal Palace, Adolf Edelswärd’s exhibition piece for the Stockholm Expo in 1866; Dutch and Korean hothouses of glass and paper for tulips, fruit, and vegetables; Bruno Taut’s and Paul Scheebert’s glass architecture; Frei Otto’s suspended tensile structures; Philip Johnson’s modernist social transparency; Kathryn Gustafson and Foster and Partner’s greenhouse in Wales’ botanical garden; or for that matter, the French architect duo Lacaton & Vassal’s thrifty expansion of the home in which the addition of an outdoor, adjacent greenhouse offers spatial abundance to socially vulnerable residential environments. But I am rambling. The glass house is and has been a symbol for utopia, for innovation-driven aims, alternatives, and progression, but also for cultivation, power, and control. Some of these symbolic values you are further elaborating on. Others, you are challenging.
/Lars
[Will return to how the glass house upends the given ways in which architecture controls the indoor climate and makes our habitat independent of what is happening outdoors. It is a thick zone where the exchange and transformation that happens hidden within a typical wall occurs openly. The space that arises within differentiates itself from the normative, standardized, and regulated. It is unstable, changing, and demands that we adapt. You mentioned this in the beginning, but it is worth returning to.]
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Steninge, 23 April 2023
The glass separates us physically from our surroundings, but we simultaneously notice what happens on the other side. It urges us to take part.
For millions of years, the earth’s systems have been developing in order to work together in the best possible way, the ecological systems, those we previously in this text called ‘services’ are just as much collaborative partners. If each person grew to know and protect their immediate surroundings, learned to read the systems that we have lost contact with through industrialization and urbanization, we would also understand the global connections, the relationship between details and the whole. Knowledge about the environment is constructed through experiences with nature.
To return to Bengt Warne, there are, even if his ideas about naturhuset reflect his time, many positions and challenges in common. In the book På akacians villkor (On the Acacia’s Conditions, which he wrote with author Marianne Fredriksson), he laid out rules in order to best “live in harmony with nature.” These rules are accompanied by a deeper explanation, and he describes naturhuset as a holon, a whole that functions in symbiosis with its surroundings—with the neighborhood, other houses, the district, and nature. “Humans are their own best resource when they learn to work with nature rather than against it. Only then can they abolish environmentally destructive technology. With the term ‘nature house,’ I mean every building that provides enrichment without destroying, plundering, and poisoning.”
The rain is pattering on the window panes. After days of sun and heat, we can almost see the plants growing. The wood anemone peek out between the beech trunks. Soon, the treetops will again shade the ground below, but in the shift, arctic starflowers—like a last call to lift our gaze before the canopy covers the sky.
/Patrik & Caroline
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Steninge, 1 May 2023
There among the wood anemone and in the resumed company of Bengt Warne is where we should wrap up. I was unfair and am splitting hairs. “Working against” nature isn’t a drastically changed view of the control we exercise over the ecological and/or of our right to use this power. But Naturhuset does not just stand there, going nowhere along with Bexell and Steninge Glassworks. It chose a direction but hesitates before taking that last decisive leap. You are now finding yourselves in the air.
There is no end. Maybe that is the point. That this text which we’ve tossed back and forth over the spring is itself a part of the Test Site you’ve created. It is unfinished, it continues. It moves, weaving in and out of drawings and seedling trays. Down among the newts in the pond. Propagating itself around the dinner table. Moving up to the terrace where it looks out over the dusk, Skintan’s valley and swarming moths. It observes, formulates, encircles, opens up, reviews, tests, and converts to exactly the residential and workplace environment you were searching for. Hopefully, it continues. We haven’t finished talking about the abilities of art. Or about questioning restrictive occupational roles and areas of knowledge that have established divisions between and among construction, architecture, landscape architecture, HVAC and sanitation systems, ecology, agriculture, and teaching. We need to write more about ecocriticism and climate fiction. And about pear varieties.
We dream. We see. We build. We are not alone. We are seen. We respond.
It will only be a few more weeks before the natterjack toads lure me out to the island again.
/Lars
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