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Fredrik Krohn AnderssonSenior lecturer, associate professor

About me

Fredrik Krohn Andersson is Senior lecturer in Art History and Director of Heritage studies.

Research

I received my PhD in 2012 on a dissertation on conceptualizations of nuclear power plants as architecture, landscape and heritage, a research interest that I am continuously pursuing. My research also deals with architectural historiography and metahistory, and materializations of cultural policy. I am currently working on research project on the contemporary heritagization of the cold war funded by Riksbankens jubileumsfond.

Research projects

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Kalla kriget som njutning och ideal

    2021. Mattias Frihammar (et al.). Dagens arena

    Article

    Känsloläget i försvarsdebatten har höjts, inte minst av Försvarsmakten själv. Frågan är inte längre om utan när kriget kommer. Den nya retoriken åkallar känslor förknippade med kalla kriget. En hotfull historisk period som idag används för att rättfärdiga försvarspolitik och signalera trygghet, skriver fyra forskare som tittat närmare på läget.

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  • Man caves

    2020. Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Mattias Frihammar. (O)tryggt? texter om makt, plats och motstånd, 124-148

    Chapter
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  • Urban Nuclear Reactors and the Security Theatre

    2019. Anna Storm, Fredrik Krohn Andersson, Eglė Rindzevičiūt. Securing Urban Heritage, 111-129

    Chapter

    During and immediately after the Second World War, physicists and engineers in several countries worked intensively and in competition to develop nuclear weapons and to control the chain reaction creating nuclear energy. An experience of urgency and a sense of revolutionary future promise permeated the activities and largely outweighed the risks as they were calculated at the time. As a result, small experimental reactors were built at research institutes or universities relatively close to city centres and densely populated areas—the key localization factor being the physicists’ own geography. This chapter focuses on three of the early pioneering urban reactors, located in Chicago, Moscow, and Stockholm, which were all symbols of national prowess as humanity was entering the nuclear age, and later became objects of heritage processes. We scrutinize the early operations as well as the making of atomic heritage, through the conceptual lens of the ‘security theatre’. The concept highlights the relationship between, on the one hand, calculable risk and security, and on the other hand, perceived risk and security. We argue that, overall, the security theatre displays reversed characteristics if comparing the establishment period with the processes of heritagization in the way that the calculable risks were initially high but downplayed, while subsequently being low but exaggerated. This tension between calculable risk and perceived risk, we suggest, forms the key to the attraction of contemporary atomic heritage. This chapter is based on historic and contemporary written and visual sources, together with interviews and on-site visits.

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  • Mediating Public Cultural Policy

    2018. Fredrik Krohn Andersson. The Power of the In-Between, 261-283

    Chapter

    This article examines how the supposedly new public cultural policy in Sweden during the 1960 and 1970s was mediated and materialized in a number of forms. The cultural policy encompassed both a contradiction between the emphasis on a broadened concept of culture and a more narrow understanding of cultural practices, as well as a conflict between elements of power and control in policymaking, and assertions on the necessarily free character of the cultural domain. Departing from three cases, in form of the government committee report Ny kulturpolitik 1972 and the government bill on cultural policy 1974, the building Kulturhuset in Stockholm 1974, and the information film Jämlikhet – för handikappade? 1973, an approach of governmentality is in conjunction with perspectives of inter- and transmediality implemented in order to analyze how the potentially inherent conflicts and contradictions of the cultural policy were enacted in these various mediated forms.

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  • The advantage and disadvantage of architectural history in the age of history of built environment

    2016. Fredrik Krohn Andersson. Konsthistorisk Tidskrift 85 (1), 85-96

    Article

    During the 1970s an architectural historical turn took place in Sweden. The 1970s also saw the breakthrough of a changing conceptualization of architectural history under the name of history of built environment. This article discuss how the historiography of history of built environment was produced and used, primarily focussing on the literature of the undergraduate programme in preservation of built environment, established in 1978. The aim of the article is to analyse in what way the historiographical content reflected and enacted the changing conceptualization of architectural history during this time.

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  • Kärnkraftverkets poetik

    2012. Fredrik Krohn Andersson (et al.).

    Thesis (Doc)

    The first Swedish commercial nuclear power plant was ordered in 1965. By 1973 it had been inaugurated, and building work had begun on the remaining three facilities that became the locations of Swedish large-scale nuclear power production. This thesis explores what kind of architectural objects, in a broad sense, the nuclear power plants in Sweden was discursively constructed as during these years.

    During the post war years enormous expectations were in Swedish politics attached to the implementation of nuclear power technology. An important discursive figure was that energy was of fundamental importance to society. Simultaneously it was articulated that nuclear power would provide an unlimited supply of energy. Society therefore was on the verge to a completely new era, an era which was to materialize through the nuclear power plant.

    Drawing upon Norman Fairclough’s theorization of discourse, three different orders of discourse are delineated wherein the nuclear power plant during the period 1965–1973 could be conceptualized as building: a discourse order of architecture, of landscape and of cultural heritage. It is a question of what sort of collective identity that is constructed through the utterances on nuclear power plants. Through the orders of discourse not only objects are produced, but also a who, on a collective level, that is producing them.

    These orders of discourse are connected to three different specific modes of temporal orientation which are formative for collective identity: towards the future, the past, and a position outside of history. Through an analysis of utterances and narratives in magazines, official texts, films, etc., this examination shows that in contrast to an international context, the nuclear power plant in Sweden was almost completely negated within the discourse order of architecture. Instead it was within the discourse orders of landscape and of cultural heritage that the nuclear power plant was to be conceptualized.

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