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Ulrich Lange

Affiliated Researcher

Department of Conservation
Telephone
+46 31-786 63 41
+46 766-18 63 41
Mail
ulrich.lange@conservation.gu.se
Visiting address
Medicinaregatan 7 B
413 90 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 130
405 30 Göteborg

About Ulrich Lange

Teaching Areas - Architecture and urban history - Rural livehoods and settlements

Research areas - Rural settlement History - Agrarian Historia - Farm Buildings and Environments

Current research Transformations of a noble past The project is funded by Berit Wallenberg Foundation.

A project in cooperate with Stockholm City Museum on the feudal landscape that even around 1900 surrounded Stockholm. At that time some manors were converted into garden cities but many others continued to be large farms until the postwar period when the new suburbs were built. The Manorhouses were transformed into institutions for the society's weak people. After the closure of institutions the buildings are now transformed again, often to Hotels, Showrooms, Cconference Centers and Spa facilities. Agricultural buildings remain only in cases where they have been in granite and virtually impossible to tear. Memories of Workmens life, works crofts and cottages, have almost everywhere been demolished.

In this project, we investigate how the city politically and by urban development were comparable to historical values of the landscape and buildings and how they have been treated during the 1900s and up to today. We also set up what remains of older land use in a feudal landscape context to try to increase knowledge and interest in suburban cultural history and green values.

Dialogue around 40 years of changes in the cultural environment The project is funded by the National Heritage Board.

A project in cooperate with the regional organization Västarvet about changes in small towns and in the countryside in western Sweden during the last 40 years. The aim is to study the extent to which the early 1970`s building inventories and evaluation of buildings came to influence the development. The method has been to re-visit some of the evaluated urban and rural environments 40 years ago and comparing contemporary photos and descriptions of current conditions.

The results shows large differences and gaps in communication over time between cultural heritage, municipalities and property owners. The project will result in a narrative report on the basis of statistics. We will also use the results as the basis for an upcoming exhibition on urban change in Ulricehamn and Vänersborg.

Swedish social structure and Swedish architecture in the German Palatinate The project is financed by prize money and grants from the Foundation Fluidium.

In 1681 the Swedish King Karl XI inherited the German duchy Palatinate-Zweibrücken in the Rhine valley. The country had been occupied by France since several years and was devastated by war. Cities and villages lay in ruins and the population had decreased. The French depredations had led a veritable "holocaust". Karl XI and Karl XII was given the task of rebuilding the country. Swedish administrators, builders and surveyors were sent to the Palatinate. Swedish time lasted legally until 1718, but in practice until 1735. Today, it is valued highly by local historians and cultural carers and emphasized as one of the best historical epoch of the people. Karl XII's role as Duke is much more prominent there than in Sweden. Buildings that have been built by Swedish architects and builders are highlighted as being among the most important cultural sites in the country.

The project is designed to probe how this heritage structure come into being, how the process is run and to identify the players. It is furthermore to formulate a Swedish-Palatine cultural history about a time which today is probably unknown to almost all Swedes.

Rural municipal communities The project is not yet financed

The project examines the municipal society as settlement structure and arena for urban and modernity. What was the municipal society's efforts? Who lived there? What kind of urban space did they try to create and what were the motives? By starting from the inside of the material, reflected the conditions that originally set the framework for people's lives and shaped their social relationships.

Municipal communities arose during the industrialization and disappeared shortly after World War II. They constituted a separate entity within a larger rural municipality and was a administrative transition structure between rural and urban areas, characterized by urban modernity but often in symbiotic dependence on an agrarian surroundings. They were also the result of a few peoples notions of a different life than the rural areas offered them.

Many municipal communities today are municipal centers, but often described negative and forth in the guise of low-educated population, unemployment, weak economy, ugliness and xenophobia. A consequence of this is that their structures and urban elements are rarely held up as valuable. The project aims to highlight the communities importance and to help today's inhabitants not be inferring its history.