Innehållsförteckning för No. 1 - 2023 från Rum International

Ellinor Thunberg We couldn't do it without our contributing editor Ellinor - the most productive writer in the industry. Love working with you. You penned approximately one million great stories for us. What is the strangest that ever happened to you on our account? “Thanks. The pleasure is all mine! Not sure, but reporting from an active building site, like I did from World of Volvo for this issue, is something special. I love to see a building slowly take shape, piece by piece. Having to paus an interview and step aside, due to an alarming noise or heavy lifting is always something out of the ordinary compared to the usual press viewing or open house.” In three words, what is so fascinating with architecture and design? “People. Places. Power."…

Design and practicality hand in hand. To us as design fans, it sounds like manna from heaven. Or freshly ground pepper, in the case of the cheerful Molino pepper and salt mills by Fabien Cappello for Hem. This kitchen sculpture, perhaps slightly on the phallic side it's true, is made from birch, and hand-painted and varnished just to make our lives that bit cheerier. The perfect present for people who love cooking. Or for me? I always appreciate a bit of extra spice.…

"Have we got to wander about looking at architecture again? It's not as if we're not doing that all day anyway," said no-one ever as we stepped into the new ArkDes exhibition Tham & VidegÅrd - On: Architecture. Instead we all became children again, heart and soul, each of us also equipped with the same stocking-footed look as your average preschooler. The actually not particularly revolutionary revolution of putting the objects underneath us makes all the difference. It's a bit bonkers. But it's more than a trick for effect. It also creates a distinct sense of the space. The use of the square metres is rendered almost dramatically visible. And what's that if it isn't architecture? Add one of Sweden's most important firms of architects, Sweden's architecture photographer in a…

When I'd just paid a visit to the office of the chic new company Spaces Within, which is gorgeous, I wrote on Instagram that I'd willingly sell a kidney to be able to afford their products. The offer is still on the table so let me know if you want to do a deal. What we've got here is something as bold as a completely new brand that hasn't just thought it all through but also intuitively knows how to make something big. Out of something tiny. What they sell is doorknobs and handles. Or you could call it jewellery, their main source of inspiration. A small, carefully curated collection whose products exude a tangible character of their own in solid brass. And the finishing touch? Every piece is ceremonially…

“Nothing leaves Näringen” is a kind of mantra for the architects drawing up plans for the development of Gävle. It makes sense. The Näringen district is going to be the city’s biggest ever transformation project. Comprising 6,000 new homes and 450,000 m2 of other premises, this district of the future is also set to be the most sustainable in Europe, and hopefully circular too. “Gavle City Council asked us what a circular district would look like. So we made one,” says architect and research and innovation strategist Charlie Gullström from Sweco. The material she produced, working jointly with Swegreen and the Vinnova programme AIFOOD, will undoubtedly inspire other cities to follow Gävle’s example. So far, the job of developing Näringen itself hasn’t dropped into Sweco’s lap but the Circular City…

Twelve years have now passed since Fyra’s four founders made the decision to start their own design agency. What a crazy idea! That was actually the last thing they ought to have done, as they all had secure incomes, sizable personal loans and young children to boot. Why cast your future into doubt, start your own company, perhaps work even longer hours, and abandon all that security? “We wanted to do things our way, a new way. To stop complaining and start doing. It was that simple,” says Eva-Marie Eriksson. Her three partners agree (at least I think they do, as they immediately all start speaking at once). “It’s true. We were in our thirties, had superbusy lives, so why not start our own business?” “Massive loans and all! Now…

A tiny palace in a mini-garden, ambivalence planted in the form of the architectural object in a lush, verdant setting. The interior is simple and partly lowered to reinforce the presence of the surrounding greenery. The two levels, or floors, offer different degrees of intimacy. The only walls run lengthwise along the sides of the space. The bathroom and storage are hidden behind a cabinet in lacquered wood, whose scale deliberately lies somewhere between architecture and furniture. After all, a palace should not be too simple. Project Very Tiny Palazzo Where Porto, Portugal When 2021 Architect Fala Atelier Landscape architects Oh Land Size 40 m2…

IT IS A LITTLE AFTER ONE IN THE morning, and in my hotel room I can hear the air-raid sirens sounding around Lviv. Having by now spent a few days in the city, it’s clear that most of its inhabitants no longer bother about the sirens. They sound almost every day, but it has been several months since any missiles targeted Lviv. The city’s historic centre has so far been spared by this war. Few people want to spend 45 minutes each day in a bomb shelter without good reason. The sound, however, reverberates through your body, and my hotel room is on the 8th floor. I move down to the conference room in the basement that serves as the hotel’s shelter. Just four other hotel guests are down there,…

WILD GARDENS SPILL OUT ONTO the narrow streets between the radical terraced houses that make up Cité manifeste in Mulhouse, just 30 minutes from the tripoint where the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland intersect. Seventeen years after the inauguration of this ambitious project, with its 61 terraced houses designed by architectural heavyweights such as Jean Nouvel (winner of the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize), Shigeru Ban (winner of the 2014 Pritzker Prize) and Lacaton & Vassal (winners of the 2021 Pritzker Prize), Duncan Lewis and Matthieu Poitevin explain that the dream lives on: a lush garden city with atypical housing that offers people the opportunity for a better life than would have been the case on a market that values profit maximisation. Today, monthly rents for these terraced houses, which…

Lisa Marie Mannfolk Eklund: Welcome to a brand new issue of Rum. We've grabbed some coffee and settled down to chat about words and architecture, two of our favourite things. Cecilia Öfverholm: As long as you have a keyboard in front of you, you can do amazing things. LM: I can’t guarantee it but it’s nice to be able to rely on something in these difficult times. CÖ: Do you write a diary? LM: No, I don’t. I’m far too scared someone else might secretly read it. Not sure why, because it’s hardly going to be explosive material. I found my old secondary school diaries recently. They were so boring. I was so guarded. Heaven forbid anyone might find out which boy I fancied. CÖ: That sounds dull. I fancied…

Yes, there is magic in the world, even on a grey day in November. We arrive in Gustavsberg with our scarves pulled up high and our gaze focused on the studios. Alexandra Nilasdotter is an interesting acquaintance who has worked in her own business, the Normal Object Factory, which she runs with her husband Liu Chien-Kuang, and for Subjective, Swedese and now Höganäs. But more about that in a minute. First we need to talk about where she is sitting working. You architects are really keen on spaces, if I remember right. And my own love of artists’ studios is well known. So I’m going to drop an inspiration bombshell. Signe Persson Melin’s studio. “I didn’t know it had been Signe’s until after I took it over,” Alexandra explains. “You’re…

“I work with historical influences in general all the time, and with folk art in particular. But when I was on my industrial design course, it was all about the future and I found it hard to adapt to that. I wanted to get my teeth into making contemporary things that weren’t copies of someone else’s style but that also involved ornamentation and other banned things. Design history is part of my DNA. I draw on history in my work. I ask myself: ‘What is this interesting element here and how can I take it further?’ And then I leave history aside and move on with my own design. This time, I was interested in turned chairs. Where did they go? They used to be everywhere. It feels almost radical…

The big snowball represents working with the circular economy. Industry players are pushing, and decision-makers are trying to push them too. But in practice, unfortunately, it’s often a matter of picking low-hanging fruit - like reusing furniture. There’s a wealth of data on the potential for reuse and circular solutions from environmental and climate perspectives, as well as in economic terms. For example, a recent study conducted by IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute showed that sending a reclaimed wooden window from Cape Town to Stockholm is better in terms of climate impact than making a new one. And yet that snowball is slow to reach the top of the hill. As architects, it feels like we find working with numbers difficult. However, I am firmly convinced that the more facts…

You work on both interior design projects and furniture design. Which do you prefer? “I enjoy both, but I probably still prefer making furniture. It’s a calmer pace. I’ve done lots of interior design projects over the years, and they’re always more stressful. At the same time, I wouldn’t want to be without those projects, because they give me ideas for designing furniture - and a deeper understanding of the context for a piece of furniture, how it should be used and experienced in a room. And the problem that need to be solved.” What inspires you? “I have an exhibition at Vandalorum in Värnamo right now about exactly that. I get inspiration from all sorts of things in my everyday life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be other furniture.…

PHOTOGRAPHER PORTRAIT ÅKE E:SON LINDMAN We all know the way twelve-year-old boys chase each other down school corridors. They kind of whizz past as if their surroundings didn’t exist. It was a day like that that changed the life of a certain young Mr Lindman, commonly known as Åke. He was chasing a mate at school in Luleå. His friend hid in the school darkroom and Åke ran in after him. “It was like entering a whole new world,” photographer Åke E:son Lindman says now. “The bubbling sound of the equipment and the orange light in the darkness. I totally forgot about my friend.” At that point, in the mid-1960s, neither he nor anyone else could have had any idea that he was going to become one of a tiny…

WAVES SPLASH OVER THE BOW of the boat that provides a shuttle service across Weerwater, a small artificial lake in Almere. Behind us is Floriade, the site of an international horticultural exhibition, which will now be developed into a new residential district called Hortus. Ahead of us is the city centre’s multicoloured skyline. At one end is the anonymous row of brick houses built along the waterfront back in the 70s, and at the other is the city’s hospital. In between these, a number of architects have livened things up with undulating façades and irregular angles, as well as buildings in which the most popular floors have the greatest volume. The city’s theatre, which was designed by the Japanese architectural firm SANAA and completed in 2007, is also visible. Almere…

INTERVIEW WÄSTBERG I look up and we’re in Lund. At a standstill. That’s often – perhaps always – unsettling when traveling by train. The young guy next to me is going to Copenhagen and then onwards through Europe, in a long chain with so many changes that he must be an incurable optimist to ever think it would work. “My Interrail pass expires at midnight. I left 25 minutes to spare in my planning.” My fellow travellers and I are interested, but we don’t have high hopes. Mostly, we all wonder to ourselves: Do they still sell Interrail passes? He disappears to the mysterious Coach 4, where staff have promised – via the crackling announcement system – that they are on hand to solve any problems. He doesn’t return, so maybe…

Why do you make your own works of art? “Because we have to. Architecture is a job but it is also something bigger and more meaningful. We think as we draw and draw as we build. We can’t separate the two. To us, our collages, drawings and buildings (actual buildings and their representations) are part of the same value-building process and represent our true work, the project.” Have you always worked this way? “Yes, we’ve never really thought about it much. It’s a natural tool for us; simple, intuitive. We take photographs in the same way as we make our collages, and we make the collages the same way we take photographs. It’s difficult to separate the creation of the building from the creation of its representation.” What is the…

A bright day in early autumn. Chris Martin and 1 sit down in the sun-drenched showroom in Stockholm’s Södermalm. I’m not getting coffee. Apparently Massproductions doesn’t have an espresso to offer even though their premises were a café not long a go. Such is life. Chris has just had his hair cut and having spent the summer walking in the Lake District, he exudes looselimbed flexibility. Though it’s probably mostly metaphorical. Whatever they said at nursery, a good dose of fresh air doesn’t necessarily solve every problem. As we know, there are other ways to tackle challenges. A bit of healthy competition, for example. “I came into the office one day and Magnus had put a drawing on my desk. He’d drawn a wooden doorstop with a nice, sculptural handle.…

HABITAT - DESIGN Sometimes you say yes to things because the universe wants it. Something bigger is urging you on. So we find ourselves on the train to Eksjö in Småland to attend Jonas Bohlin’s exhibition Saker (Things). What will he be showing? Don’t know. Products? Gadgets? Stuff? Maybe. Poetry? Philosophy? Wisdom for life? Definitely. The subzero temperatures are flaying our cheeks and a sudden heavy snowfall is only a breath away as we step into the Örsjö Belysning lighting factory. On the left, just inside the door, we can hear a sound installation. It piques our curiosity. Cheerfulness. Sets the bar. We don’t know it yet but we are about to step into a parallel world created by Jonas Bohlin. A synthesis of the arts, where he stands for…

You don't have to love your neighbours. But we do. WE ALMOST RUSH headlong into a Finnish sauna paradise. Only almost though. It turns out that Löyly, designed by Avanto Architects, doesn’t open for another 15 minutes. We are locked out and a bitingly cold wind is blowing in off the sea. We take a walk around the building, which has generous outdoor spaces leading down to the water, and shiver, both with delight and from the cold. It is so cold that standing still is really not an option. We have to keep moving. Preferably towards the car. The architect and photographer Tuomas Uusheimo and I jump in and shut the doors quickly. We take a breath and switch on the heater. This all started a little over an…