3/8 What about a house in the shape of a Blue bell flower?



This is what is at the moment being built for a private person’s children’s playground. It is a part of a large installation consisting of a fir tree shaped sand box, a swing hanging under a rainbow arch and the bluebell house with a heart shaped terrace.



Here I used the skill of a carpenter to make the structures. They should last as long as a normal house. To make a shape like this is admittedly more difficult to do than to put up four straight walls, but to the carpenter it was more of a challenge. With more works with shapes like this, it might not take as long as the first one to make. The blue bell house also functioned as a testing project for the blue bell shaped greenhouse, which will be placed on the roof of my own coming house.
Here we are very close to the architecture of fairy tales. The strict separation of ”playful” childhood and ”serious” adulthood is crucial in our society. Is it possible to break through this boundary? Is it possible to take the step and use the same ideas, as described earlier, for buildings in real use in the society?
One of my firsts attempts to use art as a way to create an identity for a building was the Rastis school project in 1997.



I was commissioned to make a public art work for the school. I hurried to the architect and asked if the building was up already and if there were any possibilities to interact with the building elements like floors, ceilings etc. The architect, Karl-Johan Slotte, said that the floors are still under construction and kindly gave them to me, an act not so common among architects. I started by writing a story about two small islands, who had lost their father island millions of years ago. When they went out to search for the father island they met a lot of strange people and adventures. The teachers liked the story and even wanted it to be a part of the school’s educational program. This means that the classrooms are named after the story, the pupils have made songs and plays, which take off from the story. Underneath is a sculpture of the Hedgehog, made of kitchen utensils and casted in bronze, who helps the small islands!



The floor of the school’s entrance was turned into the sea of the archipelago, by using cut out ceramic plates. Figures from the story were cut by computer aided cutting and inserted in linoleum carpets.



The father island was made like a sculpture in the middle of the “archipelago”.



Architects often talk about the ”soul” of a building, so I got the idea to make souls for some of the rooms together with the pupils, for example a soul made of used kitchen utensils, placed in the ceiling of the school’s dining room.



I think it is important for the children, and the teachers also of course, who are in the school that they have a memory of being in a kind of a “feeling”, en emotional surrounding. Perhaps it can create a “room” inside your consciousness, to which it is pleasant to return later in life. To have the memory of spending your youth inside a tale instead of a boring box. I hope it brings the same safety, which I feel that the fairy tales I heard and read when I was young, give me. They still help me to feel the wonder of life in midst of all sadness and cruelty. forward