Architecture’s Radical Bureaucracy, lecture by prof. Helena Mattsson (KTH)

Political and spatial deregulations of neoliberalization have made market logic the hegemonic rationale of today’s architecture, and there is a need to broaden the concept of architecture to critically analyze how it operates today and, not least, to support new possibilities for bringing about change. The discipline of architecture involves legally instigated infrastructures such as building codes and decision-making systems, but there are also shifts in mentality that define what is the value of architecture.

In this talk, Helena Mattsson discusses why we continually need to revisit these determining mechanisms to challenge the discipline's role and how architectural history and “forgotten traditions” can be fruitful sources of inspiration for future change. The focus is on her current research project, which studies "radical bureaucracy" as a field of work in the discipline of architecture, with a focus on women’s practice. The project defines radical bureaucracy as a practice that endeavors to change the control mechanisms of the built environment – architecture’s invisible infrastructure. Instead of following Max Weber, who held bureaucracy to be a “rational institution” and the opposite of the aesthetic, imaginary, and emotional, the project takes it to be a site of speculation, experimentation, and the creation of alternative lifeworlds.

Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Her research focuses on recent history and the interdependency between politics, economy, and spatial organizations. Her monograph Architecture and Retrenchment: Neoliberalization of the Swedish Model Across Aesthetics and Space, 1968-1994 (Bloomsbury Visual Arts) was published in spring 2023. She is the co-editor for publications such as Neoliberalism on the Ground(Pittsburgh University Press, 2021), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State(2010), the themed issue of Architecture and Culture, “Architecture and Capitalism: Solids and Flows” (2017). Mattsson is a member of the research collective Aktion Arkiv.

We Need To Talk About Architecture & Governance

This keynote lecture is organised in the framework of the academic workshop “We Need To Talk About Architecture & Governance”, a collaboration between research centre ATCH (Architecture, Theory, Culture, History) at University of Queensland and research group ACC (Architecture Culture and the Contemporary) at Ghent University.
Organisation: Susan Holden, Maarten Liefooghe, John Macarthur, Maarten Van Den Driessche, Eleni Van Ginderachter.

The workshop is part of an ongoing research collaboration between UQ and UGent, in the field of Architecture and Art.
The workshop also marks the publication of OASE 120: Quality Settings, edited by Maarten Liefooghe (UGent), Susan Holden (UQ), Maarten Van Den Driessche (UGent) and Elsbeth Ronner (TUDelft).
A launch event for OASE 120 in collaboration with the Ghent City Architect (Stadsbouwmeester Gent) will precede the workshop on the 4th of November, 2025