ANTON TONCHEV Shifting Perspective in Gamla Stan Door, Passage, Courtyard

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IN

DEGREE PROJECT

ARCHITECTURE,

SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS

,

STOCKHOLM

S

WEDEN

2020

Door, Passage, Courtyard

Shifting Perspective in Gamla Stan

ANTON TONCHEV

KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

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TRITA TRITA-ABE-MBT-20127

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Door, Passage, Courtyard:

Shifting Perspective in Gamla Stan

Anton Tonchev / Thesis Project / KTH 2020

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James Burke, “Connections” McMillan Publishing House / 1981

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Part One:

Elements of Gamla Stan

Google Earth image of Gamla Stan / 2018

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Map of Gamla Stan / 1885

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Map of Gamla Stan / 1771 Map of Gamla Stan / 1716 Map of Gamla Stan / 1690

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the acquisition of public space. when the private takes over the street.

elements change over time. function, access and the walled-in doors in Gamla Stan.

lost parts of ornamentation remnants of a diﬀerent past: the walled oﬀ windows and what makes one willingly lose a light source?

what happens behind the walled window? are the vents key to the answer?

one door / three doors? how to protect the “vulnerable” elements? window grills in Gamla Stan. beauty and ﬁnctionality.

crooked doors: change over time. what happens to architectural elements when a house “settles”?

think about the hierarchy of elements. is it determined by importance only?

what’s with the diﬀerent coloring around these alleys? the lower part is always a darker color.

utilizing the protective element. cloth hanger! hidden elements. solving the AC problem bracing the corner. plus a ground wire for ice melting in

the downspout.

burglary protection and codes limiting exterior interventions - result: the interior placement of grills

question: how much of the public space has become private over the years? speculation: this used to be an ally cutting through the block. check in old maps!

more public space is lost... or is it? why deprive people of accessing the corner? there is no door there, by the way.. or at least I didn’t see one.

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Giulia Foscari, “Elements of Gamla Stan” Lars Müller Publishers / 2014

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studies of the disappearing courtyards in the Cepheus block facade “oddities” in the Cepheus block setting soft barriers in Gamla Stan - fences and gates

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Gamla Stan / 1978 Gamla Stan / 1300s

Gamla Stan / 1771

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location of the Ulyses block The Ulyses block in 1762 1800s addition

Gamla Stan in 1622

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the Cepheus block before... the Cephalus block before...

...during...

...and after the reconstruction

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Part Two:

The Art of Removal

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Diego Velázquez, “Las Meninas” / 1656 José Manuel Ballester, “Palacio Real” (2009)

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courtyard with no access courtyard with partial access courtyard with free access

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new doors existing doors

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fances

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structures

a study of built courtyard volumes in relation to height

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kv. Tritonia kv. Milon

kv. Palamedes kv. Aurora

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lost courtyards peserved courtyards ﬂipped condition

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plan of the case study with the existing archaeology and old alleys

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removed elements of the existing case study

C C A A B B

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plan of the resultant courtyards C C A A B B

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resultant courtyards - isolated

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resultant courtyards isolated with new paths

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section AA

B

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section AA

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section AA

by removing the later addition and allowing access, the corridor becomes an attractive space to occupy

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B

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B

newly open access turns private spaces into public ones

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B

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B

this new space under the sky reveals a piece of Stockholm’s history, as well as a new park-like environement for everyone to enjoy

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0 10m section AA

C

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0 10m section AA

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the reclaimed courtyards oﬀer many possibilities of interaction

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section AA

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A

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section BB

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section BB

A

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section CC

A

0 10m

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section CC

A

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interventions are as minimal as just opening a door to allow public access

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section CC

A

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activating the new space: a movie night behind the museum of Holocaust

section CC

A

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Edmund Bacon, “Design of Cities” Thames & Hudson / 1967

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Ralph Rumney, “Psychogeographical Venice” / 1957

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Door, Passage, Courtyard:

Shifting Perspective in Gamla Stan

Introduction

Have a look at this image. I would like you to remember it. It shows the axonometric view of several blocks in Gamla Stan with their current solid look. I will come back to this later. The image on the right shows a book by scientist James Burke called “Connections”. Written after a successful TV series, it explores many topics. What is curious about it is the way that Burke narrates a story. He starts with a small item and through subsequent connections of that item to diﬀerent things he arrives back to it with, just to reiterate it in a diﬀerent light. This is what I am going to attempt. So let us begin.

Part One: Elements of Gamla Stan

This is a current satellite image of Stockholm’s birth place - Gamla Stan. The network of cobblestone alleys and squares of this open-air museum draws millions of people every year. But Gamla Stan has not always looked this way. If we have a closer look at some of the historical maps we start seeing how the area has changed over the years. In fact, the feeling of a static, sterile environment is deceiving; people still live here and the area keeps transforming.

Change happens on big and small scale. It is visible for the aware observer and there are hundreds of elements in Gamla Stan, each

telling a story. A walled oﬀ passageway, a diﬀerent height for a door, a narrow plot or a sudden break in the facade could mean so much. This set of early site exploration images aimed at collecting oddities that would help me develop my story of Gamla Stan.

The focus on the micro grain of the area - its building elements - is the approach that Italian architect Julia Foscari uses in her “Elements

of Venice” work, issued for the Venice Biennale in 2014. The book classiﬁes and categorizes Venice and I have wanted to use it as the framework for my initial research.

Alternating between urban (macro) scale and the elements (micro) scale, produced a vast amount of interesting ﬁnds and topics to

explore. This soon prompted me to narrow down my focus to two paths: - the overall change of the urban texture

- the relationships between public/private spaces and the elements that constitute this - the departure/entrance point (a door or an arch), the path/passageway (a corridor, an alley, a street) and the destination (a courtyard, a light well, etc)

With this in mind I started to explore how the public access network has looked like and what has been converted into a private space. This collage of Gamla Stan and several of the more pronounced blocks

track that constant process of space appropriation over time.

Let’s for instance take a look at the block called Ulysses. Currently it has an enclosed inner court, which one cannot access freely. However, if one checks some old property plans, he would notice that there was a narrow alley that allowed free access to the court in the mid-1700s. And if one checks the oldest known map of Gamla Stan, he would see that before that the alley was passing through completely and was part of the public space. In time, streets get built over, closed oﬀ or completely eliminated, turned into private courtyards, some of which even now have started to disappear being completely internalized. To better understand the process of loss of public space and how it ties to architectural elements, I took the well documented

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lead to a courtyards but also gave side access to the street stores usually had a post and lintel looking casing. I started walking around Gamla Stan looking at doors and imagining the courtyards that let to spaces behind. And what was my disappointment to ﬁnd that many of the spaces have disappeared.

In the close study of the Cepheus block I realized that the process of space appropriation was fairly one directional, people just kept taking pieces of the common space to build over. But in the early 1900s the fear of losing a lot of the historical structures across town made authorities create a precedent and revert the process: surgically remove buildings to improve several city blocks (called sanering). A couple of examples of this radical approach are the blocks Cepheus and Cephalos. One was made into a very nice park by architects Albin and Erik Stark between 1936/1970 signiﬁcantly improving the living conditions for its residents, The other one was converted by architect Arthur von Schmalensee into the Brantingtorget we know today (1945). And here is where my project was born. I wanted to re-examine all these hidden, internal, private spaces and re-introduce them to the public by re-imagining them.

Part Two: The Art of Removal

I would like you to have a look at this image. Nothing striking, right? Just a random room. Now have a look at this image populated with people. One quickly realizes that the painting is Diego Velázquez’ “Las Meninas” (1656). The image on the right is made by Jose Manuel Ballester as part of his Concealed Spaces series. In them the artist removes people from iconic images thus creating an alternative life for artwork.

“After a deeper look it’s not diﬃcult to ﬁnd transcendence and the multiple possible interpretations, both as new images and as related to their original counterparts”

The act of removal is also the employed by me in the project about GS where by surgically erasing certain elements of Gamla Stan I shifts

the perspective of the built environment. Thus, I turn the solid into a perforated, yet I respect the history of the space.

To do this I needed to know what could be removed. I was far from completely destroying entire blocks like what the radical approach was in the 1900s, but I needed to know to what extend I could

intervene. Therefore, I charted all available such courtyards across Gamla Stan. And called out the ones that were already accessible, partly accessible, or not at all.

Then I created a set of criteria of what I could remove. First of all it had to improve the block. If possible I wanted to create continuity between these new spaces, because I saw this as a new system of alternative access to Gamla Stan. I wanted to respect historical structures as much as possible, so anything removed had to either be a fairly recent addition, or a secondary space of lesser historical meaning. Taller structures or ones that have been too incorporated in important historical buildings were left alone. I realized that some spaces simply needed access with a door that needed to be made accessible and unlocked, or a fence that needed to be removed. I have identiﬁed the moments where my intervention could work with real images of some of them. There were three major groups of intervention techniques, and one has two sub-types:

1. Removed fences

2. Doors, a. “removed wall” (turned into a new door), “removed lock” (opening an existing door)

3. Removed structures

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one’s perception of the urban texture. The removal here shifts the perspective of Gamla Stan. It creates an alternative, total system of navigation not between the buildings, but through them. Solid has become permeable, perforated. The Alley City has become Corridor City..

Thus, using the rule I had established that an ornamented door had to be the beginning of a corridor path that lead to an open court. And historical knowledge providing us with cartographic proof of where one could expect to ﬁnd historical alleys (seen in orange), I started to surgically remove later additions of lesser architectural or historical quality.

The majority of the big removals here are later additions. One is a 1950s addition to the Leijontornet Restaurant, which was hiding the only open air archaeology in Gamla Stan - a tower of the outer, late Medieval, city walls in the Tritonia block. Another late addition is a laundry space built over and over the years, which I remove to allow a third point access to the Museum of the Holocaust. The museum lies in the Milon block and serves as the middle ground between the interior and exterior public spaces with its skylight structure, huge facade window and open ﬂoor.

Where public passageways cut across buildings which also have private spaces, additional doors prevent random access across the ﬂoors. This question has also prompted me to think about the future of the project as something that incorporates spaces in the upper tiers. For now the project is entirely conﬁned to the ground level (which shifts with the change of topography) and this is best seen in section. As a result, we got this interconnected, accessible space. And while making this network of paths I kept thinking of Ed Bacon’s image from his book “Design of Cities” where he shows an interconnected pathway of Venice streets and piazzas or to the psycho-geographical map of Venice by Ralph Rumney. One can see the interconnected,

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TRITA TRITA-ABE-MBT-20127