Where do the workers go to recharge after a long day – or night – spent “building our future”? In Barackboendet, the door opens to a world of faux-leather sofas, facial recognition cameras, battery-powered sustainable development, contaminated land and loopholes in labour legislation, as well as homesickness, despair and the architectural details that shape life in a construction barrack.
In a cross-disciplinary work combining critique, theory, inventory, drawing and travelogue, architect Hugo Lindberg together with invited writers reflects on Camp Skellefteå Albatros, a barracks camp in Ursviken, in Sápmi. Established to temporarily house construction workers at the (now defunct) battery factory Northvolt Ett, the camp – as this new contribution to architectural theory shows – offers rather a dystopian indication of a more permanent and normalised living environment. It is an architecture relevant beyond the particularities of a (failed) “green transition.”
Read more about the book here