Spring 2009
Institute for Research
Over the last five months students of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology has been working in Tensta, using Tensta Art Centre as a base. The final course Cities Are Made of This has been about producing a concept for an architectural project that can be realized in a week and with an economy of 2000 EUR.
This year’s winner is the project Institute for Research (IR).
IR is an allotment garden in Hjulsta (F11) that teachers, students and others will manage over the next five years. The site will, among other things, work as an open university, a place for experimenting and as a proposal for another architecture.
The project presents an opportunity to consider architecture by referencing the Persian gardens of impossibilities, the pleasure gardens in Byzantium, the dioramaesque Zen gardens, medieval kitchen gardens, the cartesian mathematics of the Barock and all the way to the Chelsea Flower Show. The project is not only a garden but also a social site that proposes the possibility to host series of events. The Institute for Research addresses topics of organisation, ownership and liability. What constitutes the formation of an institution ultimately lays in whether it is accepted as one.
We have focused our work on economy of effect, significant changes with small means. Instead of thinking that changing something means doing the opposite, which means simply reversing the image in the mirror and continuing doing the same, this work is all about changing the way things change. During the first week there has been movie nights, barbeques and seminars on future faculties of architecture along side some hard-core gardening, dehydration and blisters.