Anna Livia Pugholm Vørsel

Anna Livia Vørsel is an architectural historian, researcher, and PhD candidate in Architectural History, Theory and Critical Studies at the School of Architecture, KTH. She holds an MA in Architectural History and a BSc in Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies, both from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In her work, she addresses the material, economic, bureaucratic, and social history of buildings, looking for traces of the socio-political and economic conditions, registered and stored within their materials.

Anna Livia Vørsel's PhD project,'Building Accounts', is a study of how the changing materiality of three buildings built around 1970 in suburban Stockholm for new public social welfare services make evident how the 'neoliberal shift' in Sweden has slowly chipped away at welfare infrastructures, physically and figuratively. The three buildings, a parklek (a public staffed playground), a public preschool and a municipal district administration office, were built in 1969, 1970 and 1971 as part of the growing welfare state and have since then changed. One of the buildings disappeared in 2009 (it was demolished), one started to smell mouldy and closed to the public in 2015, and the last changed both its use (and users), its appearance, and internal plan from the years 2016-2021.

The study uses the notion of the 'building account' in framing a theoretical and methodological discussion on how we, through a close reading and analysis of a building 'in time', can gain a different understanding of socio-political and economic changes in society and the socio-material consequences of these. The double-sided capacity of materials for registering something and revealing that same thing at the same time is central to the idea of the 'building account'. As a method, the thesis proposes to unpack these accounts through 'slow events', as processes where things fall apart, to understand the systems behind them better. Through the 'building accounts' of these three buildings, the thesis address how the 'neoliberal shift', as a 'slow event' over the past fifty years, has changed the inherent value of these buildings from a social value to a financial value, and its wide reaching (and often hard to see) material and social consequences. Through the three case studies, I discuss what the 'building accounts' can tell us about the individual buildings in each of their historical contexts, and how they together form a larger story of the neoliberalization of the Swedish welfare state in the last fifty years.