STATUS or everyday UTOPIAN ARCHITECTURE

When you google "utopian architecture" you'll come across all sorts of fantasia spectacular buildings like the walking cities by archigram, Le Corbusier's vision for Paris and other things in that big scale. For me the word utopia is a beautiful dream that is all to perfect to be realised. Something totally unrealistic but yet very beautiful, like a dreamworld with a lot of pink flowers in which all the people runs around in a constant state of ultimate happiness.

Today we live in a time where the belief in the future is gone - at least I'm told so. For me, and I believe for most of my generation, the dream of utopia is dead. It probably died with the fall of the communism and the Berlin wall, I don't know... But I certainly know that it's dead. But still more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the death of communism, contemporary architecture seems to still live in the utopian idea of total equality. You can see it in every single housing development today. There's no hierarchy between the different housing units or between the different housing blocks. They all have the same architectural status and thereby becomes statusless.

Utopian architecture. Could you tell where the richest person lives in this block?

I may sound like some tea-party republican when I say that this lack of status smells a whole lot like communism. But think about it! We don't live in communism anymore! We live in a market system where prices is affected by status. There's people that pays a lot of money only to achieve status. They pay money to show that they're rich. Why won't we let them show it by how they live? There's no opportunity for that in newly built apartments. You've got to move to premodern housing or single-family housing to be able to express your status by HOW you live.Of course you could do it by where you live. If you're rich you'll probably move to a high status neighborhood with other rich people. The problem of expressing status by WHERE you live is that it's leading to segregation, which is problematic.

Could you tell where in this building lives the richest person? I think it's kind of clear.

Reestablishing status in architecture
Therefore reestablishing status in everyday architecture could be an alternative to status by place. The only question is how to architecturally express status. I guess that we have forgotten that. But maybe we could learn from history. If you look at Casa Batllo by Atoni Gaudí for instance, the difference in status of the different floors becomes very clear by the architectural expression. And I believe that we got to go back to that. Because without that architecture is just something that has to be nice to live in - it's not reflecting society anymore.

We don't live in a classless society! I strongly believe that we are all unique in some way and we appreciate things differently. This diversity is not represented in the housing market and that becomes tragically clear if you think about how few housing typologies there are and especially when it comes to apartment typologies.

But sometimes innovations occur. One innovative housing project that i like is Urbana Villor in Malmö. Even tough there's not much status difference between the apartments in the project, it is a beautiful example with qualities that could be used to increase status. I like the idea of apartments with gardens. Gardens could be a new symbol for status when almost every new apartment building has been machine-gunned with balconies. I especially like the idea of an apartment with the qualities of a villa. I'm sure that many people is attracted to that idea and I believe that it definitely would be a high status typology of housing.

After all I believe that status is something that we all in some extent dream of and strive for. It's definitely a challenge for us architects to achieve and it could also be a driving force for better and more interesting everyday architecture. I hope for a new architecture that dares to express status and thereby reflecting the people that it accommodates.

It doesn't matter if it is a hipster, business man, professor or a workingclass family their personality should be expressed by the architecture of their homes. Well, it seems like I invented a new architectural Utopia...