Cathryn Klasto
Senior Lecturer, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Cathryn Klasto is a spatial theorist and artistic researcher. Her theoretical work operates through writing and critical spatial practice. She often engages in prototype making as a method of slow artistic research. She defines prototyping as theorisation perpetually in progress – meaning that she seeks to produce conditions for interaction and responsiveness to further enquiry. She has a BA in Art and Architectural History from the University of Warwick (UK), an MA in Gender and Law from SOAS, University of London (UK) and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Sheffield (UK). Her PhD research looked at the networked relationship between domestic interiors and urban socio-cultural, legal and economic exterior infrastructures in contemporary Tokyo.
Truths, Ethical Speculation and Subjecthood: The LTH Fountain
Keywords: public art, architectural research, experimental writing, subject-object, ethics
Abstract: The LTH Fountain is a broken fountain built in 1968. It lurks on Lund University’s Faculty of Engineering campus in southern Sweden. Designed by architect Klas Anshelm and artist Arne Jones, the LTH Fountain is a 50×20 metre structure made up of eleven steel and glass basins mounted on eleven metre high columns. Similar to a champagne tower, the LTH Fountain was designed to cascade and funnel water into the basins and then down into the lake directly below. However, shortly after its inauguration in 1970, the LTH fountain began malfunctioning; it sprung multiple leaks and the glass began cracking due to water and wind pressure. Maintenance costs were deemed too high by stakeholders and as a result, the LTH Fountain was turned off, left to enter into disrepair. Some say the LTH Fountain is a disgraced emblem of design, a tragic victim of technological, mathematical and architectural failure and ambition. Others deem it a mysterious work of public art, a devious character that has successfully avoided destruction since its operational failure. Which is true? Both? Neither? What really went wrong to call the truth into question and who is to blame? The Fountain: An art-technological-social drama is a four year funded research project (2021-2025) which has been investigating the network of truths produced by the LTH Fountain. Drawing on the truths uncovered and the ideas generated in the project, this paper, as an experiment in writing, speculates on how the LTH Fountain may have mobilised this blurred context of truth to achieve a particular agenda, namely to reject its origins as an hybrid object of art-architecture in favour of emancipatory subjecthood.