STUGA | THE NOBEL WEDDING PARK | Stockholm, Sweden | Unit 21 | 2017

Click to see Thesis

 

Stuga

The Swedish “Stuga” exploits the plentiful land to build simple sparse dwellings where Swedes seek refuge to in the summer months. By looking at different images and how they make us feel depending on their colours/captured atmospheres, an architectural language will be developed by breaking down personal photographs of my house into their basic elements in order to create a physical and quantifiable data landscape. These data landscapes, which take the form of waterfall graphs, will form an architectural toolkit to be used when designing each element of the stuga from the entire roof structure down to each individual floor tile. In this way, a set of virtual data will be manipulated to become a tangible and physical environment for isolation and refuge.

 

 

The Nobel Wedding Park

Alfred Nobel is best known for his prestigious Prizes awarded annually in Chemistry, Literature, Medicine or Physiology, Peace, Physics (and Economics). However, he had a much darker history that most people are unaware of, which is exacty what he wanted; being the inventor of dynamite, he inevitably killed many people either directly whilst manufacturing his explosives, or indirectly as his explosives were used in warfare. After being dubbed the ‘merchant of death’ he created the Nobel Prizes in order to redeem his reputation worldwide.

Nobel’s old dynamite factory building is currently being used as an events venue, from conferences to weddings. Hence, the proposal is a type of Wedding Park located around the entire dynamite factory complex. It provides a variety of wedding venues around the site, with the ability to host multiple weddings at the same time, therefore making a comment on the over-the-top nature of a wedding event. The architecture is influenced by the 15 explosions that happened around the site, both in the carving of the landscape and in the various architectural fragments dotted around. In this way, Nobel’s two sides are portrayed architecturally and harmoniously: the dark, sinister nature of a landscape carved by explosions is masked by the joviality and celebration of a wedding event.