GIMO BRUK - ARCHITECTURE, IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL LIFE AT A SWEDISH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FOUNDRY MANOR

Sammanfattning

This master’s thesis investigates the relationship between architecture, social life, and identity for the people living at Gimo Bruk, Sweden’s third largest foundry manor during the second half of the eighteenth century. The study interrogates how the manor house and its foundry landscape were shaped by the architect Jean Eric Rehn, how the identities of its patrons found expression in the manor’s architectural space, and how the landscape shaped the lives of the manor population. Original architectural drawings and a preserved estate inventory are analysed using the concepts of architectural space (Denise Amy Baxter & Meredith Martin), social ritual (Peter Blundell Jones), and discipline (Michel Foucault). In this study, Gimo Bruk emerges as a dynamic architectural space where meaning was contingent on various actors and factors which negotiated the crafting of identities in dialogue with architecture. The study insists that the manor’s double function as an iron foundry and aristocratic manor house is fundamental to understand how its form took shape, how the patron’s identities were crafted, and how the lives of the manor population were organised. The study challenges dominant narratives about the Swedish eighteenth-century manor house in arguing that Gimo Manor – a representative of the little studied foundry manor building type – possesses idiosyncratic formal and functional qualities which were inextricably linked to its distinctive double function.