Mapping the Discourse

An international seminar and a pop-up exhibition explore almost a century of Swedish architecture, interiors, and industrial design through the pages of Domus magazine.

The Programme

Developed by a group of 10 PhD candidates, nine from Politecnico di Milano – AUID programme, and one from Politecnico di Torino - ASP programme, the project investigates how Sweden has been represented, interpreted, and circulated internationally from 1928 to the present. Working systematically through the full run of the magazine, the researchers identified every page in which Sweden appears, assembling a dataset of over 800 mentions, selecting over 160 as analytically significant, and mapping 40 architecture projects in depth. From this material, they have constructed a series of interpretative cartographies that trace recurring figures, concepts, themes, and events across 99 years of architectural discourse.

The workshop

The research workshop has been hosted by the library of the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm (17-28 August), a building designed by Gio Ponti, the magazine's long-standing director, while the related pop-up exhibition has been on show during the International Seminar on the 27th of August (9:30 – 12:30) at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH-Arkitektur). The exhibition and seminar presented selected findings from the research, initiating a conversation among Swedish design culture, Italian architectural publishing, and the broader international circulation of ideas that both have helped shape.

This cumulative mapping forms the empirical foundation of the project. Layered on top of it is a series of thematic analyses, developed over a semester of study, that surface the recurring patterns through which Domus has constructed its image of Sweden across almost a century. Those patterns fall into several interlocking threads. Certain personalities (editors, authors, architects, and designers) return with striking consistency, shaping the magazine's editorial gaze over time. A persistent vision of the Swedish interior emerges as something close to a model: an ideal of domestic life whose resonance travelled well beyond Scandinavia. Alongside it, the research traces the shifting editorial attitudes with which Domus framed Sweden, at times celebratory, at times comparative, at times ambivalent. The magazine's geographical imagination proves equally revealing. The research distinguishes between Sweden seen from within, Swedish work encountered abroad, and foreign influences arriving in Sweden: a tripartite circulation that maps how architectural ideas move across national borders through the medium of a single journal. Related to this is the tension between a broadly “Nordic” identity and the specificity of a Swedish one: a dichotomy that runs through the decades, sometimes collapsed, sometimes insisted upon. At the level of the page itself, the analysis attends to composition, the balance of text and image, the diversity of sources, the structure of sections, and to how these have evolved across the magazine's history. Thematically, the research follows Domus as it expanded its scope: from design objects and materials toward built architecture, and from aesthetics toward questions of nature and sustainability that have grown steadily more urgent in recent decades.

Curated by

Research Workshop and Exhibition: Gaia Caramellino, Gennaro Postiglione, Valeria Casali, Politecnico di Milano - DAStU; Nicole De Togni, Politecnico di Torino

Seminar and Exhibition: Michela Barone Lumaga, KTH; Gennaro Postiglione, Politecnico di Milano - DAStU

Together with the PhD Candidates: Benedetta Patella, Elisa Mondin, Eugenio Lux, Jose Cherem Serur, Miriam Pistocchi, Riccardo Monella, Saskia De Fabritiis, Sofia Hosszufalussy, Yichuan Guo, Yue Zhong

Discussants: Helena Mattsson, KTH; Björn Ehrlemark, Tidskriften Arkitektur; Katja Grillner, KT

Credits | Politecnico di Milano - PhD School and AUID PhD Programme and C.M. Lerici Foundation, in collaboration with KTK-Arkitektur, Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Stoccolma, Domus.

Thematic Posters