The Golden Standard (2019)
A performative walk and narration at Hjorthagen, Stockholm with Pia Rönicke/ Walking Distance
For an exhibition by Mossutstallningar



The Golden Standard is a meteorological Sci Fi performed by us and the participants wearing heat blankets during the walk. 


We speculated on ways of building in the future, below a quote:

"The philosophy is basically that materials cannot be owned, but are merely something we have on loan from nature. In a moment we will reach the edge of the disassembly zone. There we will see the carefully dismantling of houses, and sorting of building materials. Everything will be taken apart and moved to higher ground to be used again."



Above a high-level water mark on a bench.

"The frequency of flooding in these lands have become to high for human occupation. And we, as many others, will have to evacuate to the hills. For everyone there is a blanket to keep you warm and protected in the process. This is a transitory skin, a second architecture, that reflects heat back on your body, and ironically reflects the image of the architecture being disassembled around you in a golden glow. We are in transition. Only a µ thin skin to protect us from the all to frequent bursts of rain, it also reflects the unfiltered sun rays, and deflects the sudden colds."



"You will see rabbits everywhere grazing behind the fence. Shortage of foods made rabbits the most popular home breeding animal. They are all runaway animals (probably let free by kids who were to fund of the animals to eat them for dinner)"


"Listen: It is no longer electricity you hear, but the humming from the Ocean. The Ocean comes to us as a warning, but also as a reminder, to live in accordance with the elements."


Manuscript below:

The Golden Standard

Nis Rømer: Instruction
Welcome to this walk titled The Golden Standard. We are Pia Rönicke and Nis Rømer and we are a part of Gåafstand. Gåafstand is a walking group that collectively explores our environment and state of mind through the lenses of art and urban planning. We ask you to take part, but don’t do anything that you don’t feel comfortable with, the walk lasts 45 minutes. We will end up by the Ropsten T-bana.

NR: Introduction [by the meeting point]
You will take part in a sci-fi walk that slowly ventures back in time from a future perspective. We start by looking at The Golden Standard of the new parts of Hjorthagen.

NR: The Golden Standard [first view of the disassembly part of town]
The Golden Standard for building materials, was adapted in some parts of the building industry as early as 2015. The public sector was a driver for this process, but initially companies also joined when realising there was a strong business case. This is very much to our luck today in 2055. As you might know, The Golden Standard means that no building materials that come from nature can be mixed in a way so that they cannot be separated again to be reused without loss of quality. The philosophy is basically that materials cannot be owned, but are merely something we have on loan from nature. In a moment we will reach the edge of the disassembly zone. There we will see the careful dismantling of houses, and sorting of building materials. Everything will be taken apart and moved to higher ground to be used again. Disassembler was, on a side note, one of the most common occupations last year.

Pia Rönicke: Another note on The Golden Standard 
The Golden Standard takes a lot of things into consideration. It only allows for the best. This city was built with the best material. Look closer and what do you see? Every surface is different. The eye doesn’t get bored. But it also lets us know that there is a difference between rich and poor, beautiful surfaces don’t come cheap. 

NR: The great floods [closing in on the newly built area]
All this because of the floods. The frequency of flooding in these lands has become too high for human occupation. And we, like many others, will have to evacuate to the hills. For everyone there is a blanket to keep you warm and protected in the process. This is a transitory skin, a second architecture, that reflects heat back onto your body, and ironically reflects the image of the architecture being disassembled all around you with a golden glow. We are in transition. Only a micrometre-thin skin to protect us from the all-too-frequent bursts of rain, it also reflects the unfiltered sun rays, and deflects the sudden colds. Please wrap the blanket around you - gold side out and stick together. Please follow us the last bit of the journey.

PR: Housing prices anno 2019 
As you might know these housing estates was built on public land. Half of it was sold by the City of Stockholm (in order to invest in the infrastructure) and bought up by large construction and property companies. Half of the housing was set aside for rental apartments (my note says that you could rent an 80m² apartment for a minumum 18,000 SEK a month) whereas the other half was sold as housing cooperative apartments for very high prices. 83 m² with canal view for 7,500,000 SEK, and at the more modest end was an inner yard apartment, 70 m² for around 5,500,000 SEK. This is, of course, without importance now, but imagine where that money went after the flood.

NR: Next disassembly city [note while passing through the yards of the buildings]
These parts of the city are the next to be disassembled. But do note how The Golden Standard is applied to the textures of the buildings.

PR: Look here, it reminds us of Potsdamer Platz... [Notes the buildings by café Tre Bönor]
Don’t you agree... the colours, the built-in balconies... the German influence is unmistakeable. The irony in this is, of course, that Potsdamer Platz was rebuilt so many years after the Second World War, this part will be disassembled in a quicker fashion.

NR: Meteorological fictions [note while passing the old gas works]
The most popular genre in literature in the 2040s was climate fiction or cli-fi. Meteorological data and forecasts were bent and reimagined. These huge containers were at one point rebuilt to store large quantities of greenhouse gasses. Eventually the method was abandoned, and they now have mostly historical and cultural value.

(The Gasworks (Värtagasverket) by architect Ferdinande Boberg was buildt in 1893. At the time considered the world’s largest gas containers with a volume of 65 000 cubic metres, It was abandoned in 2011 when Stockholm switched to natural- and biogas.)

Demonstration banner from the first march for making the atmosphere a globally protected entity. (Year 2028)

NR: Global Climate Ministry [note while passing the old gas works]
The UN made the entire atmosphere into a protected entity. This meant that nothing could enter into the atmosphere through human actions that was not compensated for in another way. This had historic precedence: In the 1980s, the oceans were seen as endless entities into which human waste and by-products could be dumped, even radioactive waste. This was eventually banned. During the 2020s a new perception dawned that the air that we breathe is what connects us all mentally and physically. The atmosphere is not endless either. And by 2030 the atmosphere was actively protected and legislation was enforced by the Central Climate Ministry, with the power to close down a country’s power sources if they were in excess of predefined levels. Creative climate accounting was put on par with economic crimes.

PR: Higher Grounds [going up the path + going through the fence]
We will enter through one of the new paths being formed; the raising of the sea necessitates new infrastructure, not everything can be planned. This one still needs consolidation. You might see traces of people who have been “camping on the hillside” overlooking the floods. 

Please come through the fence everybody, be careful not to hurt yourself. Feel free to relieve yourself of the golden blanket, you are now safe and out of the distressed zone, or keep it on if it feels comfortable. 

We have now entered another time zone. Or should we say a gap in time. We have left the future and have not yet entered the past. This gap in time gives us perspective. Please get a sense of where you are, feel the ground, touch the earth, open your nostrils. It is important that we connect with our senses in order to make this journey. For too long we have left our senses behind, for too long we allowed the elements of earth, water, fire and air to be misused. It is time to reconnect. And the only way we can do this is through a presence, in this time gap of the here and now. Stand still for a second, attune yourself. Take in the colours of the leaves, look at what is here. Is there something we can reuse for new purposes?

Functionalist housing [Note on the housing estate Abessinien]
We want to tell you a little about this estate. Some of you might know much more than us, please don’t hesitate to give us your story. But for those of you who don’t know these famous buildings, we will give you a context.

These houses were heavily inspired by the functionalist movement of Bauhaus. I will read aloud an excerpt from the Marxist Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer, from his manifesto of 1929, Bauhaus and Society

Give proper embodiment
Appropriate to living
Be servants of this community
Growing means
Striving after the harmonious enjoyment of
Oxygen+carbon+sugar+starch+protein
Work means
Our search for the harmonious form of existence
We despise every form
Which is prostituted into a formula 
It is the song of songs of harmony
It is a strategy for balancing within the community
Its basis is the recognition of the living space
Finally all creative action is determined by the fate
Of the landscape
If a floating population lacks these roots:

Abessinien (an unofficial name coming from Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia, after the mess of the building site) was built on the behalf of the workers in the area (members of the gasworks workers club), on ground where there had been a forest and small, unoffical allotment gardens. From the beginning, the City of Stockholm didn’t want to either sell the land or build housing for the workers here. A committee was formed and got in contact with the builder Olle Engkvist and the architect Hakon Ahlberg. A model was shown at Liljevalchs konsthall. And a plan was formed that made the apartments bigger than the original 36m². The interest in the apartments was very big, and both workers from the gasworks as well as the power station signed up for them. Hjorthagen’s people’s house and the tenant organisation Hjorthagshus were established in 1934 and made the plans come true (with a loan from the forsäkringsanstalten Folket). In 1935, 354 apartments were ready, half of them two-room apartments of 44m² and the other half 40m² of one room with an alcove. All apartments had a hip bath, central heating, garbage chutes and laundry room. Heating in the first ten years was from coke and firewood, after that with oil. Rent was 850–870 SEK a year for two rooms and 775–795 SEK for one room, depending on the location. 

After a period when these apartments were considered too small for families, they have again become very popular. People live here with less, or in co-op situations. Using localised sustainable resources to power and heat the apartments. Allotments have again become popular among the houses.

NR: Abandoned power plant
This is what caused it all. The burning of coal. Värtaverket from 1903, designed by Ferdinand Boberg. In 2016, this plant was supplemented by a new plant that used biological fuels in the form of sawdust and biological waste. You might wonder why is it better to burn trees than coal and oil? It is all about accounting; we are not using the Earth’s savings from prehistoric times, but sources that can be renewed in our lifetimes by planting an equal number of trees. The actual carbon dioxide emission from this plant is the same, or bigger than before because energy consumption soared in the 2020s and 2030s. In 2030 this type of accounting was made illegal under the UN Atmosphere Protection Act. 

NR: Listen…… you can still hear the humming from electricity. You will see rabbits everywhere grazing behind the fence. Shortage of food made rabbits the most popular home breeding animal. They are all runaway animals (probably let free by kids who were too fond of the animals to eat them for dinner)

PR: Listen, It is no longer electricity you hear, but the humming of the ocean. The ocean comes to us as a warning, but also as a reminder, to live in accordance with the elements.

 “The foam women are billowy, rolling, tumbling, white and dirty white and yellowish and dun, scudding, heaving, flying, broken. They lie at the longest reach of the waves, rounded and curded, shaking and trembling, shivering hips and quivering buttocks, torn by the stiff, piercing wind, dispersed to nothing, gone. The long wave breaks again and they lie white and dirty white, yellich and dun, billowing under the wind, flying, gone, til the long wave breaks again.”
— Searoad, Ursula K. Le Guin.

NR: Listen again….., the sound of footsteps on gravel. This is the sound of the world to come. Only materials that allow for water to drain away naturally are allowed since the sewage system broke down from the pressure of extreme weather. Personally, I really appreciate the sound. It brings a kind of calm, and brings back a connection to the soil that was lost physically and mentally, since… since the industrial revolution.

NR: The Inner community
We’ll now enter our new camp/habitat. Some compare it to the time in the 1940s, just after the Second World War. There was scarcity. Nothing could be sailed across oceans. Things were being used and reused to their full extent. But unlike then, when it was mainly about rebuilding the economy, now the way we shape the objects and buildings that surround us holds higher importance. Materials are treated better because of the Golden Standard. Ornaments are frequent, as is the inherent beauty of natural materials. Artists once again became valued members of the community for making the most of the little resources we have. You see backyard farming and chickens are all around us.

PR: Gula Husen (Yellow houses)
Was built by the City of Stockholm between 1909–1910 for the workers at the gasworks and the power station. Many of them working shifts, living further away (because of the expensive rents in Östermalm), which made their commute difficult and tiresome. A number of two-room apartments were built to heighten the standard of housing for workers; with toilets, gas cookers and a laundry room in the basement (but no electricity or central heating) All the apartments went through from back to front. The architect was Frithiof Swensson (1873–1919). In total, 125 apartments, of which 99 had one room and a kitchen and 26 had two rooms and kitchen.  

Around the time of the construction of the apartments there was a pine forest enclosing the housing, which slowly succumbed to the pollution of the gasworks and the power station. The area had very bad air, which was, of course, also a health risk for all living here. This makes the area so different today.

In the 1980s the apartments were completely renovated and decreased to 87 in total, 17 with one room, 34 with two rooms, 19 with three rooms and 17 with four rooms.

NR/PR:
Please settle down, have a break.
Thanks for walking with us!

Further Images:

Society of Independent Cartographers
Independent groups of roamers eventually formed a society seeking to map the new topographies formed by the changing water lines. They drew maps on silk cloth, a material fine enough to trace the narrowest of lines and the most minute changes to the surroundings. Furthermore, the silk maps were not destroyed by water but  could be curled up and stowed in a pocket if a hasty retreat from the water was needed, and withstanding being soaked. Their logo, interestingly, resembles the emergency blankets.