Hötorgspassagen Drottninggatan, Stockholm This space, called Hötorgspassagen, is located between T-Centralen and Hötorget in Stockholm, lodged in between the large flagship-stores on Drottninggatan in a late 20th century house. It is a small shopping arcade with your regular fast fashion stores, run-of-the-mill jewellery and a small Italian coffee bar. When entering the passage there is an immediate sense of ugliness. This first impression probably comes less from the ugliness of the architecture itself and more from its connotations to shopping malls. Spaces imbued with hollow consumerism and poor quality for the sake of easy profit (referring both to their architecture and the stores themselves) makes a cheap fishing lure seems like a fitting analogy. Furthermore, it doesn’t help that malls rarely are great architecture, another preconception making it hard not to judge the space beforehand. The volume is hard to comprehend even when trying to examine it. There are twists and turns and strange angles all through the passage. It has the feeling of a real arcade where the architect have had to merge the space between two building as good as they can, difference of course being that this space probably always was part of the house, thus denying them any leeway. The materials are not much better. There is a decent base provided by the glossy beige stone floor, it’s a pretty material on its own. The rest of the space is mostly cold white plasterboard (in contrast with the stores mostly warm white), normal glass for the store fronts, and then the red glass sliding doors by both entrances. You also have different coloured baseboards on each side of the space. The difference isn’t very obvious which makes the choice seem even worse. There are not that much ugly furniture or fittings but those that are there make up for the lower quantity. The flower pots by the entrance are a thing of marvel. They are built in a shiny black plastic which stands in a stark contrast to the rest of the architecture, making them look like black holes both in photos and real life. The fake plants in them are also in a much darker tone then the rest of the space making the whole piece look like one big black blob. To finish it off, they are not aligned to neither the spatiality nor to each other. Their crooked and asymmetrical placement really make them stand out like objects not meant to be there. With the brushed steel railing another colour
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is introduced in the space, building on this amalgamation of materials. Furthermore, for some reason (probably building code), at the end of the slight slope it turns 90 degrees to the right and straight into the store front. It seems like there were supposed to be something there, but now it only creates a pointless square with prime view over H&M’s make-up department. But the crown jewel of this place is still the ceiling. White boards illuminated with sloppy red spotlights bringing the aesthetic together as a weird offbrand spaceship. These spotlights are also found by the entrances trying to cast a feint red light, matching the red glass doors and the misaligned red carpets. All this finally land in one big mess of crashed aesthetics and a space that desperately seems to be straining for effect in some parts, while trying to be natural in others. It has the feeling of being designed in The Sims, but without the grid helping the player align their walls. It almost has an uncanny valley feeling where everything is off, but not off enough to make it an obvious design choice. Lazily and cheaply designed in a poor attempt to come off as cool but classy. [AL]