SWAN operates simultaneously as architectural project, urban narrative and symbolic dispositif, articulating a speculative model of post-industrial urbanism grounded in hybridity, sustainability and civic ritual. Conceived as a new public place for the district of Nye Kungsberget, the project frames architecture not merely as infrastructure but as a generator of collective meaning.
The twin towers, stylised as the figure of a swan, function as an urban icon in the classical sense theorised by Aldo Rossi: a permanent form condensing memory, identity and aspiration. Yet unlike the monumental fixity of modernist icons, SWAN is performative and programmatically porous, embedding schools, art centres, housing, gardens, markets and sports halls into a single, vertically layered organism. This compression of uses transforms the building into a civic condenser, intensifying encounters between generations, disciplines and rhythms of daily life. Lloveras thus proposes an icon that is not aloof from the everyday but metabolises it, reconfiguring symbolism as an effect of use, participation and ecological interdependence rather than mere visual dominance. At the core of SWAN lies a reconceptualisation of public space as a multi-temporal and pedagogical environment. The plaza functions as an urban threshold: by day, an outdoor classroom and playground for schools; by evening, a commons for residents and informal cultural activity. This diurnal mutation resists the mono-functional zoning that has historically impoverished urban vitality, replacing it with a choreography of temporal overlaps. The integration of water purification systems and rainwater recycling into a public garden extends this logic, making infrastructural processes legible and experientially accessible. Sustainability here is not aestheticised as green spectacle but operationalised as shared knowledge and daily practice. The edible roof gardens, designated as the “fifth façade,” further radicalise this ethos by converting surplus surfaces into productive landscapes that feed both school and public restaurants. In doing so, SWAN collapses the separation between production and consumption, education and subsistence, leisure and labour. The city becomes a didactic machine in the Foucauldian sense: an apparatus that forms subjects through spatial experience, cultivating ecological literacy and communal responsibility through embodied routines.
The project’s educational and cultural programmes intensify this pedagogical urbanism. Two modern schools are interwoven with two art centres and stacked activity halls, forming what Lloveras describes as a “double generator” of cultural and civic life. This spatial coupling of formal education with artistic and performative practices destabilises disciplinary silos, aligning with transdisciplinary pedagogies that privilege experiential learning over abstract instruction. Classrooms become multifunctional, permeable and luminous, while libraries and workshops open onto commercial and social spaces. The result is an educational ecology rather than a closed institutional enclave. Notably, the inclusion of senior workshops in urban gardening extends this learning economy across age groups, reframing the elderly not as dependents but as active custodians of knowledge. This intergenerational infrastructure transforms SWAN into a social sculpture in Beuysian terms: a form that shapes social relations as much as spatial configurations. Culture, here, is not a decorative supplement to urban development but its primary metabolic engine.
The mythic dimension of SWAN—explicit in Lloveras’s invocation of “the urban myth”—should not be misread as regressive symbolism or naïve utopianism. Rather, it functions as a critical narrative strategy for re-enchanting the city under late-capitalist conditions of abstraction and alienation. The swan, as figure, condenses associations of grace, fidelity and transformation, projecting an image capital for an emerging district seeking coherence and dignity. Yet this symbolic surplus is anchored in rigorous programmatic realism: mixed housing typologies, market-oriented and public dwellings, electric mobility infrastructure, underground parking and logistical cores. The project thus navigates between myth and technics, affect and logistics, icon and commons. In doing so, it articulates a model of “new urbanism” that rejects both nostalgic pastiche and technocratic functionalism.
SWAN proposes density without alienation, monumentality without authoritarianism, and sustainability without moralism. It stands as a speculative prototype for an urban future in which architecture is not an object of consumption but a civic interface, mediating between ecological limits, cultural production and the fragile poetics of collective life.
Lloveras, A. 2018. SWAN: New Historical Icon. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2018/05/swan.html
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