	contact us

	advertise

Subscribe to Architectural Record
and save 60% off the newsstand price

Electric Dreams: Wake up!

By David Sokol

The phrase “Swedish design” calls up images of spare spaces laid by careful masons or rendered from local woods. Not minispectacles, such as the ceiling of Pleasant Bar in Stockholm, which is covered in convex security mirrors. “We often get that comment, that we’re not what one expects from a Swedish design studio,” says Joel Degermark, one half of Electric Dreams. That delightful surprise would explain why the two-year-old Stockholm studio has recidivist clients already. Weekday, makers of the white-hot denim line Cheap Monday, have commissioned Electric Dreams to design two retail boutiques, and the new fast-fashion company Monki has deployed a pair of interior concepts among 13 stores.

Photo courtesy Electric Dreams

Weekday Malmo, Malmo, Sweden, 2006

To see five projects by Electric Dreams, click here.

Rate this project:
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.

----- Advertising -----

Degermark and his partner Catharina Frankander say that in part, they imported their frankly un-Scandinavian sensibility from abroad. Frankander cites Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama as an influence, calling her experimentation with infinite space “a kind of personal rediscovery of mirrors.” Degermark studied product design at the progressively conceptual Royal College of Art in London. Degermark and Frankander hadn’t known each other in their native Stockholm, but they wound up sharing a flat in London in 2002, while Frankander was also pursuing a master’s degree at the Architectural Association. Then, in 2005, Degermark was invited to take on the first Weekday assignment. He asked Frankander to join him, and the following year Electric Dreams was born.

The name “Electric Dreams” was chosen on a whim, parroting the title of a forgotten 1984 movie in which an architect’s computer comes to life and battles its owner for a girlfriend. More pragmatically, Frankander explains that the name is open-ended, allowing the duo to pursue multiple design disciplines. Moreover, she says, “We like to build dreamlike worlds. It’s about exaggeration: too much, too beautiful, too ugly, too many.”

Frankander makes the point that projects are not just exercises in surface decoration but interior landscapes in which hyperbole generates form. For the second Weekday store, in Malmö, Sweden, Electric Dreams imagined planting an abstract yet Brobdingnagian tree within a two-story store. Giant roots, sporting a compressed honeycomb geometry, swerve through the downstairs space, and chrome-plated hangers are the branches that suspend from the upstairs ceiling. Equally important, Frankander likens the project to an urban plan writ small, “with different destination points and nodes and centers.”

The two Monki concepts also support Frankander’s claim that excess and architecture are not mutually exclusive, and show how Electric Dreams’ practice seamlessly fuses spatial and industrial design. For the first Monki, Electric Dreams created component volumes that, like otherworldly Legos, could be configured differently. A vision of a postapocalyptic city yielded Monki 2: Giant molecular structures are sliced open to reveal lighting, and a vegetated shoe display suggests Mother Nature’s reclaiming a chemical spill. “For a space to have value, it’s better that it provokes some kind of emotion,” says Frankander. “Even hate is better than indifference.”

del.icio.us

Reader Comments: