The year Sigurd Lewerentz develops his ideas for the Riksförsakringsanstalten, or the Social Security Administration Building, in the Norrmalm district of Stockholm, Sweden, he postulates: “from an architectural point of view, it is possible to think of a large cemetery comprising a series of smaller cemeteries surrounded by walls.” Furthering his symbolic obsession with the cemetery, he criticizes tombstones as being nothing more than “enormous blocks of granite and other types of rock that stick out of the ground like a forest of stones.

 

Upon first glance, the Social Security Administration by Sigurd Lewerentz (1930-32) is a sea of tombstones—arranged horizontally and vertically in a semi-circle. Here, death is not referred to in the literal sense, but rather as a vehicle to create a program. The metaphorical immortalization of citizens’ records, tombstone windows, an archive inttered. The effect is that of a panopticon, each visitor or user the subject of intense scrutiny from windows which envelop them in an almost 360-degree fashion.

 

What if a central tombstone, core or stele housed social security records in a more concise, digital format? The transparent staircase encircles offices, features extra-wide circulation, and a core cylinder of records and other mechanical systems. At the nucleus of a circular curtain wall, the core records appear as a caged monolith, with visitors circling around it and looking outwards, a play on Lewerentz’s original design for the age of digital transparency.