The
Steamery
Disciplines
Urban Design
Landscape Architecture
Collaborators
Funkia Landskapsarkitektur
Project commisioned by Stockholm City
Location
Stockholm, Sweden
Status
Project Proposal
2021
The Steamery is a project playing with our imagination and actually interacting with it. Half true, half not, an island in the middle of Stockholm is extending with a hybrid landscape over the water, in the form of a metallic mesh, sometimes peaking above it in small imaginary hills, other times going slightly under water allowing it to go through and form small imaginary lakes. A slight capture of the ideas we play in fiction movies, such as Black Mirror, and a gentle reminder of the power and infinity of our imagination.
Stockholm Water Map, Stora Essingen Island
Stora Essingen,
Added fillings, since 1840
Stockholm
Stockholm is a city built of islands, and sometimes islands are built of other islands. Literally. Due to its layout, to hop from one island to another you need to pass bridges, tunnels or take boats when the season allows.
All the construction work to make it lean and clean, left behind large dumps of soil and rocks to manage. Instead of paying to dispose off them, the city decided to be creative and make good use cases. So then small ski bumps appeared into the city landscape (Hammarby Ski Slope) and some islands changed their shape in time due to the filings around their edges. This is the case of Stora Essingen which redrew its contour several times, and it may do it again.
Hybrid proposal
Fillings added in time
Stora Essingen
The island had been much slimmer in 1840, as shown in the graphs bellow. Since then, there have been added solid fillings, sequentially, on top of which popped buildings, greenery and several bridges. Currently, there are ongoing plans to densify the N tip of the island with dwellings and offices. So then, why not another filling?
This time though, it is a filling that is just a mesh surface made of a sturdy metallic grid, coated with non-slippery recycled rubber, under which you can see and sometimes even interact with the water. This mesh is a transparent landscape that allows people to walk on its imaginary hills and step in its imaginary lakes that appear when the grid goes slightly under the water surface.
"In a world of appearances, reality draws itself as being still and same enough time as to become an object portrayed by a subject"
Hannah Arendt
