Town house, Landskrona

Landskrona is a small town, beautifully situated on the coast between Malmö and Helsingborg, just across the water from Copenhagen. The kind of place people from far away are always saying they should move to, but never do. In fact, most people don't even want to go there. In a European or global context Landskrona's recent past is an all too familiar story: an old industrial town watches local manufacturing disappear but fails to react and does not take the expected step into a post-industrial future. The last twenty years have turned Landskrona into a statistically shrinking city, and it is the only Swedish example of a declining inner city, not unlike Baltimore or Detroit. An unpleasant side effect of this is that the small town is nowadays the stronghold of the Swedish extreme right.

Gamla Kyrkogatan is a short street, lined with gable-roofed town houses, leading to the main square of the historical centre, Rådhustorget. Since September it is also the unlikely setting for an uncompromising, super-abstract building. Notwithstanding most people's startled reaction to the building, it is completely within the building regulations, which allow for 2.5 storeys. Also to the surprise of many, nobody filed any objections, which made its passage through the notoriously unpredictable and crypto-conservative Swedish building bureaucracy fairly smooth and swift.

The 125 m² town house is the first completed building by Stockholm-based practice Elding Oscarson. Jonas Elding and Johan Oscarson met at the architectural school in Lund where they collaborated on diploma work. After graduation they went their separate ways for the next eight years; Elding was at SANAA in Tokyo working on the New Museum in NYC, while Oscarson worked in the office of architect/designer Thomas Sandell in Stockholm. In 2007 they got back together again and with this project and a couple of others lined up, they set up their own practice.

Although it may look almost effortless in its lightness and completeness, the whole project has been carried through with excessive patience and a kind of architectural fundamentalism. The clients were a male couple who had acquired some real estate in central Landskrona and were looking for someone to help out with the structural side of building, as one of them was an interior designer. Little by little the project grew, from technical advice to building design to interior design, to finally include the garden layout. One requirement of the project brief was that the house should be able to function as a gallery for private showings, as one of the clients is starting up as a part-time art dealer after years of collecting.

Technically the infill is a big box made of white-plastered concrete bricks, topped with a sedum roof. Two inserted floor slabs divide the box into three different interlocking spaces, creating three levels (instead of the permitted 2.5) within the maximum building height. White steel stairs connect the different levels. The floors span the five-metre interval between the two side walls without additional support, and consist of a corrugated steel roofing, doubled on the advice of the structural engineering consultant Konkret (Stockholm), then topped with some light concrete to avoid buckling and to make them suitable for the spruce flooring.

At first glance the concept may seem a bit obvious – a white box inserted into a historical context for maximum contrast and effect. But when you actually study the street's diverse typologies, the boxy new volume fits in better than some of the tired specimens from the 1970s. A key feature of the project is the building's ground-level presentation and relationship with the street. Through the glazed entrance you cannot only see the hall and the kitchen, but also beyond into the garden. Unlike its neighbours, there is no need for front steps. The height difference between street and garden is resolved internally by a series of shallow steps. At the end of the very small and informal garden there is what the building regulations call a shed, but which is in reality a smaller white box with sedum roof containing an office. A door at the rear allows access to the clients' second property on the other side of the block. The proximity of this second house also explains the relaxed requirements for storage in the new one. In all, a surprising building in a surprising setting, and proof that gentrification can sometimes be very good.