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 three ordinary welfare service buildings in suburban Stockholm; it investigates how larger sociopolitical and economic changes in society are registered and revealed in the changing materiality of buildings over time. 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, respectively, as part of the growing Swedish welfare state. These buildings have experienced a series of changes: one of the buildings disappeared in 2009 (it was demolished), one started to smell mouldy and was closed to the public in 2015, and the last changed its use (and users), appearance, and internal plan between 2016 and 2021.

In this thesis, the ‘building account’ acts as a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing the neoliberal shift that has occurred in Sweden in the last fifty years, in terms of how it has affected the materiality of the buildings and the activities that occur inside them. The focus of this study is not solely the history of the social welfare services but also how the buildings and their architecture facilitated and actively shaped the activities inside and how changes made to their materiality over time stopped or prevented those buildings from operating as originally intended. As a theoretical concept, the building account unpacks the complex double-sidedness of materiality and architecture, operating as a means for analysing the wide-reaching (and often hard to see) material and social consequences of social, political, and economic shifts in society. The building account also offers a method for studying buildings that have not been widely documented in sources traditionally used within architectural history. Building Accounts illustrates that while many small material and physical changes to a building may not effect a large or harmful impact in their own right, in accumulation, such changes greatly affect our built and social environments. In the cases addressed here, those changes complicate our understanding of the historical entanglements between buildings and the Swedish welfare state.