summary 610 etwe e n 1734and1970, the construction of Swedish rural district courthouses was the legal responsibility of the inhabitants in the judicial districts.The law stipulated that the building was to contain a courtroom and two chambers, and there should also be a jail for malefactors. In1734, when the law was passed, sessions in dedicated courthouses had already been held in certain judicial districts for more than one hundred years, while others still used the premises of the local inn.Although the court of law constitutes a fundamental institution of our society, its socio-spatial conditions and past have rarely been the object of academic research.The aim of this study is to examine the design of rural district courthouses from the period of 1734-1970, starting out from the often-assumed causal relation between function and form. Is it possible to understand the design of these buildings through its function? Sociologist Henri Lefèbvre argues that although space is constantly produced by us and for our purposes, it governs our lives without our knowledge, since we take it for granted and consider it a second nature. Lefèbvre’s perspective is relevant to this study for two reasons: Firstly, he asserts a connection between space and social relations and sees them as perpetually interdependent. Secondly, he emphasizes the importance of identifying the different aspects of space in order to understand how it is produced and what it produces. Setting off from his theory of the social production of space, this thesis will deal with the subject by taking into consideration and studying the different stages of the building process as separate entities. Divergences as well as similarities between the courthouses as they were conceived, built andused will be presented in order to contribute to a complex history of law court space, which includes several uses and users and expresses seemingly inconsistent conditions.This work is in part based on a national survey of courthouses, but also on four case studies, and it alternates between an overview perspective and close-up studies. As a B
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