the Moral Institute of Higher Fiction

Sammanfattning: The Moral Institute of Higher Fiction is an independent institute acting on urban issues in the city of Stockholm through critical spatial experiments that operate on the threshold between fact and fiction, challenging our assumptions about architectural realities. The work of the institute dates back through history and also contributes the critical projections of possible futures. It traverses, and even collapses relations between temporal and spatial continuity, in order to comment on contemporary Swedish society. We engage in our given commissions by investigating their charge of affect and ideas; how these contain and transmit the thoughts and ideas that preoccupy contemporary society, shifting our relations to ecologies, challenging skepticism and stirring belief and action - all through the telling of stories. This thesis diploma design research explores the invented construction of the MIHF in order to investigate the status of architectural reality, specifically to assert that architecture is more than merely built form and emerges instead on the threshold between fact and fiction. It follows that the design research uses the notion of the plausible, or how far a suspension of disbelief can be maintained in exploring the precarious zone where fact and fiction intersect. The research also poses questions about the temporal and spatial alterations of both architecture and society - in the search for a future field of architectural practice that consciously intervenes in a politics of space and challenges what architecture is most often assumed to be. A perpetual reconstruction of the Moral Institute of Higher Fiction is undertaken to address societal ills, including xenophobia, fear and loneliness, set against the backdrop of the city of Stockholm. All of the commissions that are undertaken by the institute actively take part in its current embodiment which is sited on the northern shore of Royal Djurgården. Manifesting as architecture, this is where the stories of the Moral Institute of Higher Fiction unfold.