Independent thesis Advanced level (professional degree), 20 credits / 30 HE credits
On 1st of July, new building regulations will come into effect (Boverket 2024). On the day of submission of this report, 29th on May 2025, it is 33 away.
This is a historical moment in Sweden.
This is a study on the evolution of Swedish residential room types and the relation between legislation and architectural design in the collapsed Swedish apartment unit.
On the 18th of February, I received an email from Svensk Byggtjänst containing a link to a document titled ‘650 frågor om de nya bygglagarna’ (2025, p. 16) which stated the following:
”Det går inte att lägga regelverken sida vid sida och se tydliga skillnader pådetaljnivå”
”It is not possible to place the sets of regulations side by side and identify clear differences at a detailed level.”
A provocative statement that this project contradicts.
The project is structures in three phases:
Phase I: 2023Phase II: evolutionPhase III: 2025
The topic has been explored through the design of one residential apartment evolving following the iterations of the regulatory handbooks, how the handbooks categorize and describe the room and apartment types. Categorization of any species, room types in this instance, is a temporary abstraction. An abstraction that is the base of what the built apartments performing as people homes come to function and look like.
The apartment is looked at in the years of 1942, 1964, 1985, 2023, and 2025, where the rooms can be compared to the temporarily abstracted categorizes of room types in Swedish residential history since the 1940s.
The production of room types has been research-based and strategically developed in Sweden since the 1940s. According to Mattias Kärrholm (2020, p. 2) referring to a room type as a species leads to a more animated and ecological discussion of type. The handbooks, which allow for housing architecture to operate, typify apartments and rooms, triggering rooms to evolve towards collapse. The bathroom is the only room that has evolved a resistance to collapse. Both in terms of materiality and an expansion due to the layer of accessibility.
The investigation of collapse has led to an apartment type consisting of a general room, the collapsed apartment, with a movable bathroom and kitchen module, the bathroom being the last room. This is due to the new framework being non-prescriptive, and the framework being explored through the lens of collapse of rooms.
This is an academic approach, and the design result is an investigation of collapse of rooms and its implications, as well as a provocation of the new framework, exploring both possibilities and dangers we might face.
2025. , p. 32