Umeå universitets logga

Based in Umeå, Northern Sweden, this project looks at the phenomena of moving whole houses and other buildings. This practice occurs through- out Sweden, in the USA, New Zealand and other territories. Moving structures this way has occurred for over a hundred years. This research picks up the practice, initially through the potential spectacle of the event 

of moving structures, and then focuses on a more material and poetic aspect of the practice. It has not been researched in depth and much of what seems to be understood as a normal, if infrequent phenomena, raises questions about the use of resources, spatial planning and conceptions and representations of space and artifacts. There is also an appreciation of the substantial immediacy of process of moving a particular house, the aquired skills and knowledge of the mover, of materials and substances in the process and also how it stands in contrast to the production and representation of architecture and spatial plans framed through the conceptual and actual lens of digital screens. 

The process of moving a particular house became the subject of documentation, from stages of preparation to the uplift, the unsettling, moving and settling. Through re- peated visits to the sites of the house moves, it became possible to develop awareness of the history and extent of this practice. The house mover Magnus Mårtensson has more than forty years of experience of the history of house and building moving. 

Part of the research was to re-visit original sites and the new location of the house after several months. This was a photographic and video documentation and material for re-thinking the process. The form of this was further photographic and video work, to record and project the mid-summer move, along with historic materials from the public library history collection and regional museums onto and into sites, buildings and surfaces. 

This chapter has four parts. There are inserted transcripts of comments from a video interview with Magnus Mårtensson and his son Andreas Mårtensson (who had worked with Magnus on house moving). There is an historic overview of the practices of moving houses by James Benedict Brown. There is also a theoretical frame to the process of mov- ing houses and the fourth section is a description of some of the creative and potentially 

speculative re-presentation of the process and practice of moving buildings, which has been developed collaboratively with Robin Serjeant, through the Relate North Symposium at Yukon University in January 2023 

The inserted transcripts develop the spatial significance of this particular form of building moving. It allows for close reading of the economy of the production of space, through this traditional process, which is associated with restrictions on the dimensions of the space. It occurs without the use of specialist cranes and cages.