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Elisabeth Gellein on Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture
25 January, 2025
We love shacks, because they pose impossible questions. How can we change what we need? How can we fearlessly acknowledge weakness as an animate and constructive content of collectivity?
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works:185
Lisa Robertson‘s Office for Soft Architecture (OSA) is a conceptual and poetic project that explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, language, and art. Rather than a traditional architectural office, the OSA operates as a literary and artistic framework, producing texts and works that investigate the ephemeral, sensory, and narrative dimensions of space and place. This book, “Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture”, was published in 2003, but Robertson’s project is ongoing.
Lisa Robertson, is, much like ourselves, a hut dweller. In 2021 Spacegirls built Kaffehytten, a little architecture project in a forest in the Danish countryside. Heavily inspired by Robertson’s idea of the hut’s impossible questions, we set out to create a sensuous and collective project with a special connection to its site and the local community. As a culmination of our own project, we published a book in 2023 called “her här her”. The title of one of the diary passages from the book was lifted from Lisa – We Love Shacks. Lisa’s poetry is baroque, tactile and heavily ornate. Her beautiful sentences fold and twist and hit you like the soft caress of flowing fabric. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world we inhabit could be populated by architecture like this? Maybe this is what we need?

Kaffehytten by Spacegirls, Gentle hunting, heavy softness, Årstal: 2021. photo: © Hampus Berndtson
In 2020 Robertson released her first novel, The Baudelaire Fractal. Here she writes about a girl who wakes up to discover that she is the writer of Baudelaire’s complete works. Well, if Lisa is Baudelaire, then we would love to wake up and find that we are her!
We experience weakness as a pliancy, the structural ability to welcome desire and change
Lisa Robertson, Occasional Works:182