Origin of things, maker of place: An investigation of birch bark as matter in transformation
Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Program
Architecture and urban design (MPARC), MSc
Publicerad
2022
Författare
Fredriksson, Sofia
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
Each material comes with an embedded set of historical, cultural and
physical attributes. Furthermore, each material has a sourcing place
as well as production processes during which it becomes something
else. When finally material has become thing, it has often travelled
far and with many stops along the way. In the master’s thesis Origin
of things, maker of place, a deep dive is made into birch bark in
order to explore the attributes and connotations of this material.
With the use of an intuitive and iterative method, themes have
emerged and formed through collecting and producing information, and
the produced information have then generated new impulses. Evoking
associations such as nature and culture, forest and city, resource
and consumer, affected and affecting, usefulness and uselessness,
tradition and creativity, birch bark is both the starting point for
exploration and the thematic glue that binds the disparate subjects
together.
Since birch is a tree native to Sweden and its bark a product of
its forests, this thesis can also be read as a comment on the Swedish
forest industry. Because of the industry’s vast impact on the
landscape it is interesting from a spatial point of view, but furthermore
it taps into broader questions concerning what, how and why
we produce as a society.
The investigations have been reworked into spatial visualisations
within a fictional narrative. Through working with the method, the
fictional narrative have become centred around the forest and our
relationship to it. The narratives were then organised into chapters,
where the themes have been brought together and restructured
as speculative scenarios with their own designs and architectural
structures.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Birch bark , Forestry , Craft , Fictional narrative