Architecture in Character – the Unintentional Portrait of a Lost Building

Architecture in Character – the Unintentional Portrait of a Lost Building - a lecture by Björn Ehrlemark and Carin Kallenberg.

This talk will tell the story of how a lost architecture was pieced back together from the fragments of Swedish crime fiction.

St Görans girls’ vocational high school in Stockholm by the architect Léonie Geisendorf is perhaps little known beyond the local Brutalism connoisseurs. Yet, it is strangely familiar to the ”Nordic Noir” movie audience. The reason is that in the early 2000s the high-rise was left abandoned, with much of its original 1960s interiors intact. Then a film crew arrived, and then another, and another. St Görans was called up time and again to play the part, whatever the desired post-war Scandinavian welfare state setting might be. You could argue that St Görans was typecast.

A few years later, the building’s movie career ended as abruptly as it had begun. Suddenly, the scenes from the thriller days tell a different story. This time St Görans plays itself.

Neighbors of Architecture produces architectural culture in the form of exhibitions, events and publications. It is co-directed by Björn Ehrlemark, an architect and journalist regularly contributing to international magazines and journals, and Carin Kallenberg, a curator and Lecturer in Architecture and Critical Studies at the Royal Institute of Art. They live in Stockholm, Sweden.