What constitutes the architecture of urban dwelling? What shapes its limits? What hopes is it meant to fulfill?
Dwelling projects have always played a key role in the narratives surrounding urban identity. Indeed, the construction of urban identity is largely affected by a precise set of spatial configurations and material arrangements that coexist in a particular time and place. However, the architecture of dwelling in a city is not only constituted by the one that is actually built, even if the endurance of its particular aggregate of rooms, walls, and households might make it appear so. Looking into dwelling architecture through the lens of the technologies that produce it — including those that regulate it, preserve it, and validate it as a legitimate wish — reveals a whole new set of projects that overlap and enable those that visibly shape the urban environment.
This paper explores three of these technologies of dwelling and their role in the construction of the Swedish urban realm. Each technology is addressed in an essay that focuses on what it is and what it does in the city. The first essay, “Standards,” investigates the sources of Swedish national housing regulations and recommendations as a semiotic technology that delimits the admissible framework in which dwelling architecture can operate. The second essay, “Archives,” surveys the aggregate of human and non-human agents involved in the practice of archiving dwelling architecture as an architectural technology for collecting, recording, and preserving what has been agreed to be built. The last essay, “Urban Fiction,” explores the programs for housing supply issued by Swedish municipalities as a discursive technology that constructs legitimate urban imaginaries. The result is a multi-layered re-interpretation of the architecture of domestic space that problematizes urban dwelling as a tangible, concrete reality.