The Power of Smallness by Aina Coll Torrent

2018-02-08T00:24:00-05:00

MONU magazine's current issue #27 on "Small Urbanism" shows how small things can have a great impact on city life and planning, exploring themes such as micro-occupations as political protest, urban furniture to recover public spaces and fight criminality, acupunctural interventions for refugee settlements or tiny models used for military strategies.

There are architectural spaces that capture you through their smallest details. Almost five years ago, I visited the Crematorium building by Asplund in the Woodland Cemetery, in Stockholm. After crossing the artificial landscape along a seemingly introverted building, I remember entering a forecourt, grabbing a beautiful door handle and entering a waiting room before reaching the chapel. A wooden bench was softly emerging from the wall, like a curved silk fabric, oriented towards a long window to an enclosed courtyard. The warmth of the space, enhanced by the metaphor of a domestic carpet and the rounding and softness of the corners, was suddenly disturbed by the image of a very small window which was framing very precisely the artificial hills and trees that were guiding the visitor when entering the site. The feeling of connection to an endless outside world condensed in a window was, somehow, sublime.

View through the window at the Woodland Crematorium, by Erik Gunnar Asplund....

MONU #27 on "Small Urbanism" released

2017-10-16T12:39:00-04:00

“… And Though She be but Little, She is Fierce!”, the title of Liz Teston’s contribution using a quote from Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, captures the content of this MONU issue on “Small Urbanism” very well. For when it comes to urbanism, small things seem to matter, whether they are actions, small physical elements, information and communications technology, or small-scale interventions. With regard to actions, Teston shows how transient micro-urbanisms of protest architecture can have a significant impact on our cities. During such actions, human bodies can alter public spaces through practices that challenge the arrangement of urban power and convert it into a channel of opposition, as Ana Medina argues in her piece “Dissident Micro-occupations”. In her explorations of dissident architectural practices, she reveals that spaces for protests are in fact not designed, but taken over by the dissidents to transform the architectural urban landscape. However, t...

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The Power of Smallness by Aina Coll Torrent

MONU #27 on "Small Urbanism" released