SSP1: The Pipedream 

SSP1: The Pipedream is a green, tube-shaped greenhouse that makes one full rotation in 24 hours. The position of the construction, depending on the time, determines its function. For example, you can’t lay down in bed until 11 p.m. and you fall out of it at 7 in the morning. At that point, the breakfast table is in place for you to groggily have a quick morning coffee before it’s time for the day’s workout on the wall bars that are suddenly in the right position. Then, you can settle down for a work session before lunch is served at a table that has rotated forward. Then, afternoon work follows until the dinner table is in the right position. After dinner, the conjoined twin garden swing comes to your rescue, where you can chill and at the same time use the bar until 11 p.m. when the bed has finally spun into the right position for bedtime.

The philosopher Blaise Pascal’s maxim that human unhappiness stems from our inability to stay in our chambers is embodied here in a twisted possibility of doing just that. The proposal to live at home in an infinite loop calls for an acceptance of our chronological connection to the physical limits prescribed by the Earth’s rotation. If we sleep the eight hours recommended by science, we will not only save our mental health but also a large part of the carbon dioxide emissions that sleep-deprived people account for. In our box-like horizontal homes, it is constantly possible to perform any of a number of activities, which often creates mental friction in paradoxical questions such as “Should I wash the dishes now or answer emails? Or isn’t it time for a coffee? And what about exercising?” The free will that modern citizens feel entitled to, which means that they can do everything and nothing at all times, is a chimaera that contributes to the idea of ​​a kind of right to use resources ad infinitum. But in order to meet the future climate goals dictated by the Paris Agreement, which aligns with SSP1, we are forced to adapt to a circular life where not only is the matter renewed, but also our mental reality. The green path may be a “pipedream”, but can it be designed in such a way that limitations and restrictions are instead reformatted into pleasurable desires?

SSP2: The Redhouse

SSP2: The Redhouse is a sculptural greenhouse designed as an upside-down red cottage with white trim. To many people, the red cottage is a symbol of the Swedish summer idyll, and this dream is often combined with a small greenhouse in the garden. Here, it has been turned on its head, with a garden swing in the shape of a blurred Swedish flag hanging on a broken flagpole inside the house. Visitors can hang by their knees and thus align themselves with the horizon of the house. Next to it floats a champagne cooler with a bottle surrounded by plastic ice cubes. The ice cubes move and create a tinkling sound when they touch the bottle. Their movements are linked to wind data from Abisko, accelerating when the wind increases in strength on the Arctic bog. The tinkling of the ice cubes is mixed with the sound of a siren hanging next to it. It is the siren that sounds at 3 p.m. on the first Monday of every quarter to test Sweden’s preparedness. But the siren in this house plays a different, familiar melody. The Swedish national anthem is heard vaguely, albeit distorted, as if filtered through a mirage. Its variations in frequency and pitch are linked to heat data from Abisko. Even medals and trophies from a bygone era melt in their fictitious fall to the ground when the greenhouse stands on its head and unfolds like a cardboard box. The roof ridges have been transformed into feet on which the entire structure rests.

Although the red cottage symbolises the quintessential Swedish idyll to many, others see it as representing exclusion, an unattainable idea far from the city’s urban hotspots. Research shows unmistakable links between increased violence and heat in big cities, both in clashes between residents and increased police violence. So, how will our society, which is already hard hit by segregation and division, be affected by an even warmer climate? In the future, will ​​greenhouses be associated with a boiling pressure cooker rather than summer pleasures?

Therefore, the city’s parks constitute a safety valve at the intersection between nature and the built environment. They constitute small oases and places for reflection and coolness. The artist Andy Warhol writes that he gets homesick for the city when he is out in nature. Because in the city, there are small miniatures of nature in the form of parks. In nature, however, there are no models of the big city.*

* “I'm a city boy. In the big cities they've set it up so you can go to a park and be in a miniature countryside, but in the countryside they don't have any patches of big city, so I get very homesick.”
'The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. From A to B and Back Again', Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, p.154.

SSP3: The Line Chart Greenhouse

SSP3: The Line Chart Greenhouse is a physical model of a line chart in different layers. They relate to five climate stations that we previously installed in Abisko on a permafrost bog. These so-called “open top chambers” heat their interior gradually according to the five different SSP scenarios, and sensors record microclimate data such as temperature, humidity and CO2 content. This information is sent via a link to the line chart greenhouse where it is reinterpreted and represented by draperies of coloured glass beads that are slowly built up day by day. A machine is installed on the ceiling, releasing one bead per minute, thus building one thread per day with information from the climate station’s sensors. Visitors can move through the data and experience it from different angles.

The connection between Abisko and the SSP3 scenario is that the Arctic is, on average, warming three times faster than the rest of the Earth. The climate change that is currently taking place there can be compared to the one that the Earth will experience in 2100 if we follow the jagged line that leads to this future. In colourful diagrams that the UN climate panel IPPC has presented since 1992, we can climb along different timelines in the outcome space towards a variety of different possibilities. But these two-dimensional graphic representations of a fluctuating global development are difficult to take in. So, what would happen if you could enter into this information and be physically enveloped by it? If you could feel each day’s data in the form of a thread of beads like a rosary, you would see how the light from the greenhouse’s fragmented roof ridge filters through the greenhouse plastic of different colours playing on the visitors’ bodies.

A garden swing with graph paper patterns is placed at one end of the greenhouse, inviting visitors to take a seat and immerse in this spatial experiment of shaped information.

SSP4: A Road Divided

SSP4: A Road Divided is a greenhouse that has been broken open to resemble large fragments of dried desert that are leaning against each other. Inside the structure, the desert continues to spread out in the form of a crushed concrete structure that is difficult to move on. Visitors have to balance on loose shards that tip when you walk on them. In the middle, a pillar-like sculpture rises with a surface of cracked concrete. From openings, reinforcing bars spread out like sprouts in search of light. When you sit down next to the pillar, everything suddenly wobbles to the side, and to find balance, visitors are forced to work together. 

The interior’s cracked surface and unstable conditions are similar to those that spread across the Earth’s drylands. Since it rains no more than 200 millimetres per year in these areas, the land is impossible to cultivate, and they are classified as uninhabitable. These regions are also conflict zones, where the lack of water fuels violence and war. The expansion of the desert therefore, brings with it extreme poverty, inequality and hopelessness that create social fault lines.

In the wake of increasing global conflicts, civil society is retreating. At the same time, extreme wealth is rising. Technological and feudal structures are emerging that benefit a very small wealthy elite, who can continue to consume and live unencumbered through artificial respiration in their privileged bubble. 

It doesn’t look good, but amidst the broken disintegration of the sculpture, some parts seem to repair themselves. In the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, what is defective and incomplete can be seen as beautiful and a possibility for transcendence, and the idea of ​​something broken does not necessarily have to be a dystopian consequence of entropic processes. A broken clay pot can gain another layer of human care by being carefully glued back together.

SSP5: Preppers Delight 

SSP5: Preppers Delight is a bunker-shaped greenhouse made of brown plastic. A chimney emits foul smoke, and you can clearly hear an engine revving inside. The bunker door is made of metal, and a fuel cap has been placed on one side of the house. Inside the house, it’s unbearably hot, and visitors can relax in the black leather garden swing and take a sweaty siesta. The leather is embossed with patterns of car tires, and together they resemble a so-called blast mat used during construction to protect the surroundings from the detonation.

The smell of rubber is overwhelming as the entire floor is filled with shredded car tires, and parts of the garden swing have outgrowths of this material. It has been vulcanised together into sticky rubber lumps that also affect the seemingly temporary emergency lighting. The lights flicker and flash as the gasoline-powered generator that hums to create electricity doesn’t seem to be working properly. This is due to the carburettor being controlled by signals from the atmospheric CO2 content and its fluctuations on the peak of the Hawaiian volcano, Mauna Loa. Ever since Charles Keeling began his measurements of greenhouse gases in 1956, the emissions curve has been moving steadily upwards. But the curve is jagged and resembles a saw blade. It is the Earth breathing. Since the largest area of ​​forest is in the northern hemisphere, the Earth absorbs much more carbon dioxide in the summer than in the winter, which means that the CO2 measurements go up during the winter and down during the summer. Hence, the jerky idling of the generator and the flickering light of the lamps that illuminate the dark interior.

In the book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman describes a future where humans are long gone and where nature quickly finds different ways to erase all traces of our civilisation. The Anthropocene imprint we thought would leave eternal scars is quickly erased. It is a thought-provoking and, in many ways, comforting book. Something that does not seem to want to disappear, however, and that will very likely become humanity’s “deep time legacy”, is car tires. So far, no biological processes or organisms have been able to break down this polymer of heated raw rubber and sulphur. The only hope is that the enormous amounts of buried car tires will come to the surface and be exposed to massive UV radiation. But that assumes a non-existent ozone layer, which is also not desirable.

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the UN has chosen to call this SSP scenario the Highway because that is the one we are currently on, along with the 6 billion car tires rolling around on all the roads of the world right now.