This thesis deals with a Swedish shopping centre, NOVA, from a phenomenological point of view. Starting in my own experience of the architecture I discuss issues such as gender, consumerism and the image of the ideal society, the Heterotopia, as they appear to me in my studies of the building.Divided into three different themes I then discuss the aspects I?ve found through my meeting with the architecture in comparison to a number of texts on the subject.My phenomenological analysis, combined with earlier research, presents to me a number of aspects more evident than others, as I do my own interpretation of the building and its architecture..

This thesis highlights starting points underlying the notions of two feminist utopians, Christine de Pizan and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In approaching their texts, it focuses on the notions central to understand their writings. These would be historical, social, and cultural contexts. Defining concepts as utopian in its varying forms and feminism has been of significance. A feministic approach grounded in Simone de Beauvoirs philosophical phenomenology in the study of feministic utopia's visibility, has contributed to the understanding of the power structures to which women are tethered. In order to understand the way women are presented, it has become obvious that The Book of the City of Ladies and Herland are literary works that are related not only by their authors? background and personality but by the society in which they lived. Through their engagement in the contemporary intellectual debate on all social planes, both authors contributed to shifting the focus of their own contemporary notions of a woman to the notion of a woman equal to men. Woman, in Christine de Pizans utopia, is given specific properties and through themes of issues given meaning. She is not free in the sense that Simone de Beauvoir says.  She has a broader repertoire than was historically assigned, but her freedom is not arbitrary, contingent, and temporary and judged by her actions.