1

From National Romanticism to Modernism

Unlike many other architectural movements, the Nordic Classical period was relatively short – starting approximately in 1910 and finishing approximately in 1930. Like most artistic movements, it had its disciples, followers and agnostics, and throughout its short life, it developed against a continuing background of stylistic confusion and eclecticism. It generally replaced the National Romantic Movement in the Scandinavian countries with many of the best National Romantic architects (such as Ragnar Östberg, 1866–1945) going on to contribute to the Nordic Classical Movement and, in turn, many of the best Nordic Classicists (such as Alvar Aalto, 1898–1976) going on to feature amongst the greatest exponents of Modern Architecture in contrast to the established history of Modernism.

Were the likes of Östberg and Aalto inconsistent in their architecture and beliefs – mere stylists of the kind typified by Sir George Gilbert Scott (1811–1878), who was able to change from Gothic to Classical Architecture for his Foreign Office building in London, at the behest of the British prime minister¹ – were they simply chasing architectural fashion or were they genuinely responding to the changing world around them? Where did the renewed interest in Classicism that spread throughout Scandinavia in the early twentieth century come from, and why was it later abandoned, almost overnight, by several of its most brilliant practitioners, as Functionalism and the Modern Movement encircled the world? If architecture reflects the society, which it serves, then perhaps we should look to the particular histories of the Baltic countries for some of the answers.

We are so familiar with the current countries of Europe that we forget that several of them didn’t exist at the start of the nineteenth century with a few not establishing their independence until the twentieth century. While the powerhouses of Britain, Russia, France and Spain had long imperial histories, Germany and Italy were not unified, and thus created, until the late nineteenth century, and the Scandinavian region did not establish its current form and nations until 1918.

From the demise of the Kalmar Union² which had encompassed all the current Nordic countries under a single monarch from 1397 to 1523, the individual countries had been in a state of almost constant flux with borders changing and various regions passing from one country’s sovereignty to another. Norway, for example, went from independence to Danish rule and then on to Swedish rule before its independence once more in 1905. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Baltic countries were dominated by Sweden and Russia with Denmark under constant threat from both Sweden and the emerging, adjacent, new German state. Denmark was forced to cede Norway to Sweden in 1814, followed by Schleswig-Holstein to Germany in 1864. Finland had long been a part of Sweden before the war of 1809, when Russia conquered the area and it then became an autonomous Russian Grand Duchy until its own bid for freedom after the Russian Revolution in 1917, when it finally gained its independence.3

Despite these numerous territorial and political changes, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, we can identify a number of key themes, which united these emerging Baltic nations. These were:

•  A strong and growing nationalist sentiment which found its expression in the arts – for example, Sibelius’s (1865–1957) Karelia Suite in the Grand Duchy of Finland; Munch’s (1863–1944) paintings in the Swedish province of Norway; the establishment and rapid growth of the Herholdt School of Danish Arts and Crafts in Denmark (whose land losses had reinforced their interest in their national identity) and in Sweden itself, where there was a renewed interest in their own culture, represented by Agi Lindegeren’s (1858–1927) studies of churches and castles; Frederick lilljekvist’s (1863–1932) plea for the reconstruction of Old Stockholm; and the seductive watercolour interiors of Carl Larsson’s (1853–1919) home at Sundborn in Dalarna.⁴

•  A long-established Northern European Lutheran tradition which brought with it a simplicity of worship; a non-hierarchical government of the church by its followers; a simplicity of lifestyle and rejection of luxury, which occasionally led to puritanism (both in Scandinavia and, through emigration, the United States); a strong work ethic; a cultural climate in which the humanities and sciences were encouraged to develop; and the separation of church and state, allowing freedom of conscience.⁵

•  A common Swedish language, which allowed the sharing of ideas throughout the Nordic provinces at least amongst the middle and upper classes.

•  The rapid industrialization of the region, which saw the predominantly rural economy and peasant culture of nineteenth-century Scandinavia transformed in its latter decades with increasing mechanization, exportation and urbanization, leading to the rapid growth of the Nordic cities and an accompanying nostalgia for all things rural and medieval.⁶

•  A growing contempt for the revivalist architecture and historicism of the mid-nineteenth century⁷ in which historic styles were employed, apparently at will, for different building types, locations or clients – often by the same architect.

The scene was set for an architectural response and ‘in Scandinavia, echoes of the past were pursued in an attempt to achieve nationally identifiable architectures. All four Scandinavian countries were seeking identity, and all four evolved varieties of what came to be known as National Romanticism.’⁸

This new spirit emerged early in Sweden and particularly in Finland, when a group of artists came to their ideological and artistic maturity at the same time – the composer Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), the painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865–1931) and the architects Eliel Saarinen (1873–1950), Herman Gesellius (1874–1916), Armas Lindgren (1874–1929) and, outside this partnership, Lars Sonck. While William Morris (1834–1896) and John Ruskin’s (1819–1900) political, socialist and artistic ideals were widely respected by the National Romantics, the particular sources of inspiration for the Finns were the Finnish folk epic, the Kalevala (which had been collected and transcribed by Elias Lönnroth (1802–1884) at the beginning of the nineteenth century) along with the wild province of Karelia with its thousands of lakes and deep, dark forests, which was viewed as a repository of the ancient Finnish spirit, as celebrated by Sibelius in his ‘Karelia Suite’.

The architects developed an enthusiasm for all things medieval – influenced by Ruskin’s writings and a desire to discover the true national spirit of their own countries, as it was perceived to have existed, prior to external influences. Their response came in hewn timber and boulder stones: ‘Characteristic of all these buildings was their rugged, granite stonework – even more rugged than that favoured by another pioneer, the American HH Richardson, by whom, in addition to the European pioneers may have been to some extent influenced – their spiky silhouettes crowning a free picturesque grouping of masses and their reminiscences of motifs found in Finnish medieval churches and fortresses.’9 The first Finnish architect to use granite in this way was Lars Sonck, whose neo-Gothic church of St Michael, built in Turku in 1895, was enriched by a stark interior in finely carved stone, complete with Norse motifs and patterns. He went on to develop these themes, now both internally and externally in Tampere Cathedral (1902) and in his exceptionally rugged, asymmetrically composed, Telephone Company Building in Helsinki (1905).¹⁰

This Sonck/Richardsonian manner was soon to be adapted by ElieI Saarinen, Armas Lindgren and Herman Gesellius in the design of their highly romantic Villa Hvitträsk (1902) (Figure 1). Here, the three architects and their families lived and worked together in an early artistic commune. Two years later, in 1904, their guild idyll came to an abrupt end when Saarinen, acting independently, entered and won the competition for the Helsinki Railway Terminus with a strongly National Romantic design. His final design with the later, rather Classical, four giant granite caryatid Norsemen (which was finally completed in 1919), was nevertheless to become perhaps the most famous Finnish building of the National Romantic Movement.

FIGURE 1 Villa Hvitträsk, Helsinki, Credit – Addison Godel.

In Sweden, the search for a new architecture resulted, amongst various strands of development, in the first National Romantic building, Gustaf Ferdinand Boberg’s (1860–1946) Gävle Fire Station of 1890, which introduced the new style. The movement here, however, lacked something of the intense nationalistic fervour of Finland and only developed fully after the main thrust of the nationalist Nordic cultural movement was largely over, notably in the work of Lars Israël Wahlman and most notably in Ragnar Östberg’s remarkable, waterfront, castle-like Stockholm City Hall (1909–1923). This is possibly the finest public building that the National Romantic Movement produced in which Östberg combined the ideal of an Italian Palazzo Publico with various allusions of the Swedish vernacular, creating what has since become an icon for both the city and the country (in a remarkably similar way to the Dane Jørn Utzon’s (1918–2008) later Sydney Opera House (1957–1973).

In Denmark, Martin Nyrop (1849–1921) completed his popularly acclaimed neo-medieval Copenhagen Town Hall in1892 – ‘a celebration of brick – the material in which seventeenth-century Copenhagen was constructed – in dramatic contrast to the stuccoed classical public buildings of the previous 80 years’.¹¹ Inside, mosaics, paintings and sculptures told tales of the history and myths of the Danish people. Also in Denmark, in 1913, Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint (1853–1930) designed his extraordinary proto-expressionist, brick Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen (1921–1940) (which was finally completed by his son, furniture designer, Kaare Klint (1888–1954) of whom we shall hear more).

Compared to other anti-industrial contemporary European artistic movements, National Romanticism was extraordinarily successful. In England, Belgium, France and Spain, Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau architects rarely received major public work, whereas the architects of the National Romantic Movement were successful in winning significant public commissions and thus delivered numerous major building projects to general popular acclaim. The principal reasons for this are twofold – firstly, because the majority of public projects in the Scandinavian countries were (and still are) subject to open architectural competition (this is an extraordinary process to those outside the profession, in which dozens of architects provide free building designs to a client in return for a small honorarium and the possibility of being selected to undertake the commission, which may or may not be built) and secondly, because their work was so closely identified with strong contemporary national and regional aspirations. This was in contrast to Britain, for example, where the Classical architecture of ancient Rome was generally seen as a more suitable vehicle for celebrating their empire and that of Gothic – their Christian faith, while their own Arts and Crafts Movement was linked to a minority of Pre-Raphaelite idealists and groups of social reformers, thus spawning the Garden City Movement, which was perhaps their greatest achievement.

While National Romanticism took hold in the fertile social and political landscape of Scandinavia, it was by no means adopted consistently, and indeed the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth saw an extraordinary eclecticism continuing throughout the region. The architectural scene in Denmark was typical with Jens Vilhelm Dahlerup (1836–1907) mining an extraordinary range of historic architectural sources from Byzantium to deepest Africa to produce everything from his eclectic Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek of 1891–1887 to his famous Elephant Gate and Tower of 1900–1901 in Copenhagen. Anton Rosen (1859–1928) also produced buildings in a variety of styles, ranging from his rendered Jugendstil commercial building at Vesterbrogade 40–42 in Copenhagen of 1907 to his very fine National Romantic later Palace Hotel on City Hall Square which was completed in 1910, where it beautifully complements Nyrop’s adjacent town hall, bringing a little temporary consistency to the square. Aage Langeland-Mattiessen (1868–1933) continued the rendered Jugendstil style well into the next decade with his Glacisgården at Østbanegade 11 in Copenhagen of 1912, and it thrived in apartment blocks in Helsinki and Stockholm, probably reaching its climax in Frederik Lilljekvist’s (1863–1932) icing sugar Royal Dramatic Theatre in Nybroplan, Stockholm of 1908, which dripped in Art Nouveau detail. In this context of eclecticism and diversity, a purge was becoming long overdue.

From National Romanticism to Nordic Classicism

By 1910, many of what were to become acknowledged as the most important works of the National Romantic Movement, such Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall and Eliel Saarinen’s Helsinki Railway Station, were under construction, and yet despite the apparent success and public enthusiasm for the architectural style, a new spirit began to swirl through the Scandinavian lakes, forests and schools of architecture – or to be more specific, an ancient spirit much older than the National Romantics’ fascination with all things medieval.

By the end of the first decade of this (twentieth) century, Scandinavian architectural circles were in agreement on at least four points: first, National Romanticism as a stylistic revival of the Middle Ages was withering away; second, it’s nationalist overtones were, however, not to be effaced but rather to be systematically displaced towards vernacular primitivism; third, classicism, stripped of its civil insignia, shared a collateral primitavist rigour with peasant vernacular; and finally, the canonical teaching of craftsman-like techniques and vernacular idioms was to be promoted through the founding of societies and artisans schools.12

National Romanticism began to be viewed as an increasingly irrelevant response to the changing economic and social environment, which the Scandinavian architects witnessed emerging around them. It appeared to be looking backward and inward for inspiration rather than forward towards the rapidly emerging modern world, and outwards towards the rest of Europe. What, initially, the younger architects sought was a new approach, which both reflected the particular character and circumstances of their region and also connected the Scandinavian countries to this wider world beyond. What emerged, in response, was far from simply a further neoclassical stylistic revival and much more a radical, outward-looking movement, opposed to the then dominant nationalist ideology – ‘the aim was not revival but renewal’.¹³

Throughout the period during which National Romanticism had developed and flourished, there had run an unbroken fine thread of Classicism in the arts, public life and education in the Nordic countries with Classical architecture, in particular, continuing to provide the bedrock of all architectural studies. All the Scandinavian countries had a well-established tradition of Classical architecture, both in their public buildings and in the everyday architecture of their town and country houses. In Denmark, for example, young architects such as Carl Petersen (Ch 2) studied the outstanding local nineteenth-century Classical buildings of Christian Frederik Hansen (1756–1845), whose churches and public buildings still dominate central Copenhagen (Figure 2) – simple, restrained elegant Classical buildings with stone basements and rendered facades above, rich in Classical decoration and with expensive stone work kept to a minimum. The painter Nikolai Abildgaard’s (1743–1809) country house ‘Spurveskjul’ of 1805 is a good example and indeed became a prototype for the simple Nordic Classical country house.

FIGURE 2 Vor Frue Kirk in Copenhagen by CF Hansen, Credit – John Stewart.

In Sweden, there was a renewed interest in their Gustavian Classical heritage. These investigations revealed not only the range of expression available within the Classical idiom but also the particularly restrained Nordic approach to Classicism, which had already been developed in the nineteenth century. ‘For its advocates, classicism … could be seen to be building on well-established, domestic classical traditions, while at the same time re-connecting architecture with the mainstream of European culture.’¹⁴

Their developing interest in Classicism soon took them beyond their own domestic architectural history to study the broader, deeper European tradition, and there was particular interest in the restrained, pure, elemental forms and largely unrealized city plans of the French late eighteenth-century visionary, neoclassicists Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) and Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799), in particular. This renewed exploration of Classical architecture, as a way forward, was not unique to Scandinavia but related to a modest revival of interest throughout Europe: in Austria, the Viennese Secession¹⁵ had been succeeded by Otto Wagner’s (1841–1918) techno-classical Post Office Savings Bank (1894–1902) and Karlsplatz Station (1897–1899); in Germany, the Werkbund Group16 were producing temples to industry such as Peter Behrens AEG turbine factory; and in England, Classicism had continued strongly throughout the Arts and Crafts period with architects such as Edwin Lutyens having abandoned the Arts and Crafts style forever for ‘the High Game’ of neoclassicism (for which he was never forgiven by the historians of Modernism). For many young European architects of this time, therefore, ‘the underlying intent was to replace what was seen as the arbitrariness of art nouveau exuberance with a new homogeneity and coherence that stemmed from the classical tradition’.¹⁷

Peace, growing economic prosperity (including numerous travel bursaries) and easy train travel allowed many Scandinavian architects and students to travel throughout Europe to pursue their architectural studies, and in this context of a renewed interest in Classicism, it was almost inevitable that travel to Italy and Greece and thus the very roots of this ancient art would quickly become regarded as de rigeur for any committed, ambitious, young Scandinavian architect. ‘Far from wishing to turn the clock back, there was a feeling that through a return to the true origins, a new start might be made.’¹⁸ Within a few years, it was Italy with its civilized urban lifestyle, picturesque landscapes and dramatic hill towns, rather than Greece, which quickly became established as the primary destination of choice.

The importance of these Italian study tours on this generation of Nordic architects cannot be overestimated. It became not only an architectural rite of passage for young aspiring Scandinavian architects and students but also, for many, a genuine search for the roots of Classicism, which were to become their life-long inspiration. During the decades of 1910–1920, Gunnar Asplund (Ch 4),Sigurd Lewerentz (Ch 7), Hilding Ekelund (1893–1984), Martti Välikangas (Ch 11), Eric Bryggman (1891–1955), JS Sirén (Ch 5), Sven Markelius (1889–1972), Ivar Tengbom (Ch 3) and Oiva Kallio (Ch 8) all made extensive tours of Europe which concluded in Italy, where most stayed for around six months, occasionally longer. Gunnar Asplund’s journey in 1914 was typical, lasting over six months and taking in Rome, Palermo, Naples, Syracuse, Taormina, Assisi, Venice and Florence, during which time he filled more than ‘three hundred sheets with drawings, sketches, notes, portraits and a wide variety of subjects’,¹⁹ as well as collecting over eight hundred postcards to supplement the photographs he took. On their return from their tours of Italy, in 1923, Hilding Ekelund and Erik Bryggman wrote and illustrated a highly influential article outlining their travels in the Finnish architectural magazine Arkkitehti, entitled ‘Italia La Bella’,²⁰ a phrase which passed into common parlance amongst Scandinavian architects during the 1920s.

Alvar Aalto, one of the youngest of the Nordic Classicists, having failed on several previous occasions to be awarded a travel grant to fund his trip, finally made his obligatory tour much later in 1924 – for his honeymoon with his architect wife Aino. For him, this first visit to Italy was perhaps the most important journey Aalto ever made. It seems to have been an experience, which he wanted to relive over and over again, until the end of his life. One of the things which helped make this journey so unforgettable, was that his teachers’ expert instruction and the general enthusiasm for Italy during his student years, had prepared him so well to assimilate his impressions of Northern Italy.²¹ Aalto’s enthusiasm for Italy was extreme; he even named his first Finnish daughter Johanna Flora Maria Annunziata. Importantly, it was not just the individual Classical buildings which so fascinated him or the other architects but ‘above all, what Aalto absorbed from Italy was a vision of a living urban culture: his love of Italian towns was without a trace of nostalgia – they were towns “rooted in the earth” which lived in the present’.²² It was this model of a civilized urban life which so captured the imagination of the young architects and inspired them not only to create their own style of Classical architecture but also to attempt to recreate the civilized outdoor Italian spaces they had witnessed – albeit often below painted Nordic ceilings, rather than a clear blue Italian sky.

For these students and architects, the impact of experiencing ancient Classical and Renaissance architecture at first hand hugely reinforced their belief in the timeless quality and continuing relevance of Classical architecture. What was perhaps more surprising and entirely unanticipated was that their journeys around Italy also developed their interest in the anonymous vernacular architecture of Italy – the so-called Architettura Minora. Hilding Ekelund on his visit to Vicenza is said to have noted, ‘Palladio, Palladio in dress uniform at every street corner with columns, architraves, cornices – the whole arsenal. Impressive, but tiring. Between them simple bare houses, just walls and holes, but with distinct harmonious proportions’.23 This interest in the simplicity of the Italian vernacular coincided with a similar growing interest in the vernacular architecture of the Nordic region with many of the young architects, including Ivar Tengbom and Carl Petersen, undertaking extensive Nordic tours in which they sketched, measured and recorded the traditional local architecture of the region.

This developing and, initially, apparently irreconcilable fascination with ancient Classical architecture and their own Scandinavian vernacular architecture was to become one of the key themes of the new Nordic Classicism. ‘Central to the whole notion of Nordic Classicism was a concern to identify and celebrate those elements of architectural language that thrive equally well in monumental classicism and its vernacular transformations.’²⁴ In the Nordic countries, this renewed interest in Classical architecture was therefore combined with a search for the roots of Classicism in their own regional vernacular – a line of enquiry, which was also being pursued in Germany by Heinrich Tessenow (1876–1950), who became a significant influence on the emerging Nordic Classicists.²⁵ Tessenow was reinterpreting the German rural vernacular in terms of a purified vision of a simplified Classical style for ordinary buildings. His disarmingly simple line drawings of an austere and well-proportioned architecture proved internationally seductive. What Tessenow and the young Nordic architects sought was to find the very roots of Classicism within their own vernacular tradition in the same way that Abbé Laugier had shown the Classical temple deriving from a primitive hut – in effect a revernacularization of Classicism. ‘Vernacular Primitivism is yet another epithet which has been suggested, emphasising the roots in a traditional local culture and the bid for simplification and authenticity distinguishing the new architecture from the stylised architecture of the 19th century.’²⁶

It was to be a new type of Classical architecture – drawing on regional roots while inspired by ancient Mediterranean spirits – but developed to meet the needs of a changing society. This was to be a radical Classicism for the people – to be used to dignify workers housing as well as providing many of the first public libraries, concert halls and power stations. It was an integral part of a new social democratic vision that was then emerging throughout the region with independence and emancipation in Norway and Finland and the rise of trade unions and socialism as a by-product of industrialization throughout Europe. Socially and politically, it was during this period that the foundations of the modern Nordic social welfare state were laid.

Quite when these developing thoughts, travels, investigations and discussions developed into a new style of architecture is debatable, I believe that the combination of the Danish architect Carl Petersen’s profound interest in the Classical works of CF Hansen and Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll (1800–1856) and the opportunity he was given in 1912 to design a small art gallery in the Danish provincial town of Faaborg on the island of Funen is the main contender as the first true work of Nordic Classicism.

What has become known as the Faaborg Museum – Petersen’s first and most important building – sees so many of what were to become established as the key themes of the Nordic Classical Movement brought together for the first time. These themes, I believe, fully justify its iconic status as the first example of Nordic Classicism. The restraint of the rendered face, combining the simplest of Doric columns below a traditional clay-tiled roof; the sequence of elegantly and sparingly decorated spaces, which provide a perfect backdrop for the collection of regional paintings and sculpture; the care with which the route through the galleries has been designed; and the variations in plan and section achieved along the way, resulted in a new building that was both excitingly fresh and original and of the highest architectural quality. For such a small building, its impact was large, and it was widely published and much visited – both by Danish and other Scandinavian architects, following its completion in 1915.

Meanwhile in Stockholm, an almost exactly contemporaneous example of the same new restrained, almost austere, Classicism was emerging on Kungsträdgården. The young Ivar Tengbom (Ch 3) had produced a highly sophisticated Classical design for the Enskilda Bank in Stockholm in 1912 to win this first commission for his newly formed practice (Figure 3). While the scale and city-centre setting of the bank was in complete contrast to the small museum on a side street in Faaborg, the buildings shared the same emerging themes. Tengbom combined very clear references to the Palazzos of Rome with his use of local materials and decorative sculpture, which drew strongly on Nordic roots. Far from being revivalism, Tengbom’s design had a cool freshness with the main facades being in smooth render above a sharply detailed rusticated base. Sculptures by Carl Milles (1875–1955) surmounted the main entrance doors, and elegantly wrought steel cages guarded the ground-floor windows in an aesthetic which would soon be widely known as ‘Swedish Grace’. Construction of the Enskilda Bank was completed in 1915, the same year as the Faaborg Museum.

FIGURE 3 The Enskilda Bank Headquarters in Stockholm by Ivar Tengbom, Credit – John Stewart.

Meanwhile in 1913, Carl Bergsten had produced a design for the Liljevalch Art Gallery nearby on Djurgården in Stockholm, which consisted of a series of enfilade top-lit exhibition rooms with colonnade overlooking a sculpture garden (completed in 1916), and in 1914, Sigurd Lewerentz’s (Ch 7)competition entry for the new Crematorium in Helsingborg in Skåne combined this new, almost elemental, stripped-down Classical architecture with a lyrical interpretation of the competition brief, which suggested for the first time that this emerging style might be capable of both rich symbolism and a considerable depth of meaning. The next year in 1915, he and Gunnar Asplund (Ch 4) collaborated on a competition entry for the new Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, which would eventually become perhaps the greatest achievement of the movement.

Older architects began to be influenced by the younger generation. Ragnar Östberg, whose National Romantic Stockholm Town Hall was then under construction, began to revise uncompleted elements – interiors became more restrained, the medieval mythology of the Golden Hall was succeeded by a lightness and Classical restraint in the later State Rooms – the cupola to the great corner tower becoming noticeably lighter, simpler and more graceful with a switch from granite to copper. Others such as Hack Kampmann (Ch 6) (already the most successful architect of his generation in Denmark) – whose previous work such as the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen (1906) had always had its roots in Classicism – became even more restrained and elemental, leading later in the decade to his final masterpiece, the Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1918–1924). Even Lars Sonck’s work, though retaining his unique elemental style, became increasingly formal, perhaps culminating in his Helsinki Stock Exchange Building of 1911 whose symmetrical facade to Fabianinkatu has a giant Classical colonnade above its arched and rusticated base.²⁷

The movement was gaining momentum, and events elsewhere were about to create a hothouse atmosphere in which the new style would be even more rapidly cultivated. While most of Europe was plunged into the First World War in August 1914, the Scandinavian countries were neutral with the exception of Finland (which was still a Grand Duchy of the Czar until late 1917 when the Finns declared independence from Russia following the October Revolution of 1917). Contacts and travel between the Nordic countries were strengthened during the war, and ‘it is in this context that Norden as a whole emerges as an architectural province in which the differences are outweighed by the links and common ideals, an architectural province which though not independent of the rest of Europe still achieved a self-independence in quality and bearing, an architectural confidence that is respected by the outside world’.²⁸

Gunnar Asplund, who was to become the greatest of the Nordic Classicists, had established his own practice in Stockholm in 1912 after winning the competition for a new secondary school in Karlsham (completed in 1917). By 1917, he had been commissioned to undertake the Snellman Villa (1917–1918), the Karl Johan Secondary School in Gothenburg (1915–1924) and Lister County Courthouse (1919–1921) and was about to start work on the design of his Woodland Chapel (1918–1920). By the time these projects were completed over the next few years, similar, new, elegant, occasionally severe Classical buildings were being designed and constructed throughout the Scandinavian countries, both by this new generation of architects and increasingly by their older peers. So what were the characteristics of this maturing architectural style – was it just another Classical revival or was there really something more original being developed in this northern corner of Europe?

The contrast with National Romanticism was certainly clear: weight and mass were replaced with lightness and delicacy – the ubiquitous rustic stonework with smooth render and flush-jointed (often lime-washed) brickwork. Windows were generally placed flush with the facade, converting the elevations into pure planes, and these were combined with the primary forms of circle, square and triangle, found in the ancient Classical architecture, which the architects had studied, sketched and photographed throughout Italy. For their materials, they looked to traditional vernacular Scandinavian farms and manor houses, combining render, clay-pantiled roofs, simple beams and panelled doors in increasingly sophisticated compositions. Looking back, a number of key themes had emerged strongly.

Clearly and most obviously, this was on one level, another Classical revival. Unlike previous ‘academic’ revivals, however, ease of travel in the early twentieth century had allowed almost all the key architects involved to experience ancient and Renaissance Classical architecture and Italian town and city life at first-hand. For most, this resulted in an equal interest in both Classical architecture and, equally importantly, in its role in supporting a civilized urban life, which the architects believed had the potential to become a model for the fast-expanding Nordic cities. In this context, their adoption of elements of the Classical language of architecture was highly selective and often more of an influence on city, town and building planning than directly in the form and decoration of their buildings. Their aim was to reconnect the Nordic region with Europe via the pure forms of Classical architecture, which they regarded as the greatest achievement of European culture.

At the same time, the counter-current of regionalism, which had been the main driver of National Romanticism, was not wholly abandoned. The challenge, to which the Nordic Classicists responded, was to absorb Italy’s civilized urban culture (rather than attempting to simply replicate it in the colder northern climate of the Scandinavian countries) and interweave it with elements of their own Northern ascetic protestant culture and vernacular architecture.

In addition to their interest in Scandinavian vernacular architecture, there was also a renewed interest in the almost unbroken tradition of Scandinavian Classical architecture, and while much of this was tainted by foreign imposition, there were a number of examples which held clues as to how a restrained, relevant Nordic Classicism might take form: the simply pedimented Inventory Chambers (Inventariekammaren) of 1780 in Karlskrona by Frederik Henrik Chapman (1721–1808) and Carl August Ehrensvärd (1745–1800) and the plain rendered facades and minimal window treatment of Carl Christoffer Gjörwell (1766–1837) and Charles (Carlo) Francesco Bassi’s (1772–1840) Academy in Turku of 1802 – being just two of many examples. The most important of these sources, however, was the work of Christian Frederik Hansen in Denmark. Hansen is often noted, in passing, as one of many influences on the Nordic Classicists, but a study of his completed buildings reveals his particular significance in successfully developing a specifically Nordic Classical architecture, which used traditional local materials in a restrained, economical and elegant way. His own study tour of Italy took place in 1782 before his move to Altona in Schleswig Holstein prior to his eventual return to Copenhagen in 1804. It was here that he completed his most important buildings including the City Hall and Courthouse (1815), Christiansborg Palace (1803–1828) and Vor Frue Kirk (1829). These all share the same, pared-down elegance: dressed stone used sparingly to celebrate entrances and openings, set against plain rendered facades, clay-tiled roofs and cobbled courtyards – simple, sophisticated monuments for the emerging city. Hansen’s buildings had a Lutheran restraint; his pure white interiors shared more with the Protestant churches of Amsterdam than with the Catholic of Rome.29 It is an extraordinary coincidence that it was Carl Petersen’s campaign to save Hansen’s Vor Frue Kirk from the imposition of a new baroque spire that led directly to his commission for the Faaborg Museum (Ch 2) – the first Nordic Classical building.

Hansen’s work in Copenhagen also showed how a Classical city might be designed, and this was another important lesson from all those tours of Italy. Creating a civilized urban life was as much about town planning (in a creative sense) as it was about delivering individual civic monuments, and the lessons of Italy were reinforced by a renewed interest in city planning throughout Europe in response to the rapidly increasing industrialization and urbanization. Classicism was to be a way of civilizing and ordering the expanding Scandinavian cities with a new restrained architecture replacing the excesses of individualism, which had already begun to dissolve the homogeneity of the urban scene. The new Classicism would provide regularity – its predictable nature providing a general architectural backdrop against which the occasional monument could be read as an exceptional event within an ordered urban structure. The work of Camillo Sitte (1843–1903), the Austrian architect, would have been known to the Scandinavians through his book City Planning According to Artistic Principles of 1889 in which he promoted the idea of the city as the compositional arrangement of fundamental spatial units – public square, street, private court and city block. Many of the Nordic competition entries for workers housing and city planning of the 1910s and 1920s drew heavily on this key publication and his proposed use of solid blocks of accommodation to create public spaces between them and into which were then, in turn, carved courtyards and semi-private spaces. Petersen, Thomsen and Kallio’s competition entries of the 1920s clearly pursue this approach, and Kampmann’s completed Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1918–1924) is perhaps the best built example of the effectiveness of this urban strategy.

Sitte’s thinking also reinforced the importance of the route through the city, and this concept of using twists and turns, changing levels, contrasting light and dark and enclosure and release, for intentional emotional effect, was also to become a key theme of Nordic Classicism. Thus, we see the importance of the relationship between Asplund’s Stockholm City Library (Ch 4), its raised plateau and the street, through which the route to the great Lending Room climbs, and also Lewerentz’s Resurrection Chapel (Ch 7) and the drama of the approach from the Way of the Seven Springs as well as the constant efforts of JS Sirén, throughout his life, to create an appropriate urban setting for his new Finnish Parliament House (Ch 5).

Just as the world war had isolated the Nordic countries and brought them together, so too its end reinforced the wish to bring a new rational order out of the chaos, collapsing empires and changing values, which the war had brought about. The 1920s started and ended with financial crises, but in between, the industrialization of the Nordic countries was proceeding apace – motor cars, electricity, mechanization and, of course, a huge demand for the many public and private buildings required to support and celebrate their rapidly growing cities. ‘New technologies entered the building field, buildings became larger and more complex, and many new building types had to be developed. Planning and legislation increased, procedures for instructing builders became more formalised, and there was an increase in professional specialisation.’30 As has so often occurred, the period of economic stagnation at the end of the war had proved fertile ground for the development of new architectural ideas and theories, which took shape once the economy returned to growth. This new Classical architecture provided a common ground that was more than capable of responding to ‘the all too bitter contrasts of the age as the Scandinavian societies moved from privilege towards social democracy, from craft to industrial production, from predominantly rural-agrarian to increasingly industrial-urban economies’.³¹

In 1920, Ivar Tengbom (Ch 3) won the international competition for the new Stockholm Concert Hall (1920–1926) with a Classical design, which combined a dressed stone portico, set against an astonishing, pale blue rendered main building (Figure 4). At the age of twenty-six, in 1920, a young Martti Välikangas (Ch 11) won the commission to design all 165 buildings of Puu-Käpylä (1920–1925), a new workers housing district in Helsinki, which was to become probably the most successful Scandinavian public housing of the 1920s and a model for the decade. Hack Kampmann, who had established himself as the most successful Danish architect of his generation, died at the age of sixty-four with construction underway of his new Copenhagen Police Headquarters, which when it came into use in 1924 became perhaps the most severe and powerful monument of Nordic Classicism.

FIGURE 4 Stockholm Concert Hall by Ivar Tengbom, Credit – John Stewart.

The year 1921 saw the completion of Asplund’s Snellman House, Lister County Courthouse and the Woodland Chapel, establishing him as the undisputed leader of Nordic Classicism. In Norway, in 1922, Gudolf Blakstad (1893–1985) and Herman Munthe-Kaas (1890–1977) designed their Town Hall for Haugesund (1922–1931), which provided two floors of shocking pink rendered offices above a grey granite base. In 1923, Ragnar Östberg finally completed his increasingly Classical Stockholm City Hall, and that year also marked the early death of Carl Petersen at the age of forty-nine, whose Faaborg Museum, completed just eight years earlier, had had such a profound influence on his contemporaries.

In 1924, the young Alvar Aalto received his first substantial commission – the Jyväskylä Workers Club (1924) in which the influence of both Venice and Asplund loomed large, and that same year, Oiva Kallio completed his Villa Oivalla (1924), which was to become a model of relaxed country living for almost every future Scandinavian summer house of the twentieth century. The year 1924 also saw JS Sirén win the most important commission of the decade in Finland with his vast, Classical, competition-winning entry for the new Finnish Parliament House in Helsinki (1924–1931).

This new generation of architects, who were emerging and developing or adopting Nordic Classicism, also contained a considerable number of women architects for the first time. Finland was the first country in the world to provide universal suffrage with the first female members of the Finnish parliament being elected in 1907, and it was in Finland too in which women were first permitted to undertake architectural studies and receive academic qualifications32 even if they were initially given the status of special students. The earliest record belongs to Signe Hornborg (1862–1916), who attended the Helsinki Polytechnic Institute from the spring of 1888, graduating as an architect in 1890 ‘by special permission’. Wivi Lönn (1872–1966), who attended the institute from 1893 to 1896, has the honour of being the first woman to work independently as an architect in Finland. On graduating, she immediately established her own architectural firm by receiving a commission to design the building of a Finnish-language girls’ school in Tampere. She designed several significant public buildings, including more than thirty school buildings. By 1930, there were over 50 women architects practising in Finland. In Norway, the first female architect was Lilla Hansen (1872–1962), who studied at the Royal Drafting School (Den Kongelige Tegneskole) in Kristiania (1894) and served architectural apprenticeships in Brussels, Kristiania and Copenhagen before establishing her own practice in 1912. Ragna Grubb (1903–1961) was one of the first to establish her own practice in Denmark, and in Sweden, Anna Branzell (1895–1983) was the first woman to graduate in architecture.

By the 1920s, several women architects were making their contribution to Nordic Classicism including Aino Aalto (1894–1949, née Marsio), Märtha Blomstedt (1899–1982, née Von Willebrand) and Eva Ekelund (1892–1984, née Kuhlefelt), all of whom were married to architects and acting as equal partners in their joint practices. The most significant contribution however came from Elsi Borg (1893–1958), who gained a reputation as both an outstanding perspective artist (illustrating Oiva Kallio’s plan for Central Helsinki, for example) and designer. She founded her own practice in 1927 after winning the competition for the design of Taulumäki Church in Jyväskylä, beating both Alvar Aalto and Erik Bryggman in the process.

By the mid-twenties, this new architectural movement was beginning to attract international interest, and in 1924, the Exhibition of Swedish Architecture in London was arranged by the RIBA, the Architectural Association and the British Royal Academy before going on to tour the United States. In 1925, the Swedish pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts, designed by Asplund and others, attracted great attention, and their work was described as both ‘Light Classicism’³³ and famously by Philip Morton Shand, the English architectural critic, as ‘Swedish Grace’.³⁴ Equally significantly, at home in Scandinavia, Nordic Classicism was achieving popular recognition and was quickly adopted by both private developers and public housing authorities, who valued it as a particularly economic solution to mass housing and in particular city-centre apartments. Its restrained materials, simple forms and sparse decoration made it both relatively fast and cheap to build. Consequently, large areas of Stockholm, Helsinki and Copenhagen, as well as many other regional cities, were expanded with elegantly proportioned, simple, rendered apartment blocks, thus successfully providing exactly the neutral background buildings, which the leaders of the style had intended. Numerous examples can be seen in Stockholm in the Vasastaden area, to the north of the city centre and in the Etu-Töölö area of Helsinki.

The year 1925 also saw the completion of Sigurd Lewerentz’s masterly, subtle and sophisticated Resurrection Chapel in the Woodland Cemetery (Ch 7), and in 1926, Alvar Aalto designed his Italianate Muurame Church (1926–1929), complete with campanile, which was not completed until 1929, by which time Aalto was beginning to establish himself as an important Functionalist architect. In1928, Asplund’s dramatic Stockholm City Library was finally completed, and shortly after this, he began work on the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, which was to be the tipping point both for his conversion to Functionalism and, following him, for most other Scandinavian architects. Classicists continued into the 1930s with Ragnar Östberg’s elegant sinuous Stockholm Maritime Museum (on the site of the 1930 Exhibition), designed in 1933 and completed in 1936, and Ivar Tengbom’s very fine Swedish Institute in Rome, not being completed and occupied until 1938, but these were now isolated incidents in a world where Modernism or Functionalism (or Funkis as it was then known in Scandinavia) had now become the dominant force.

From Nordic Classicism to Modernism

Just as the shift from National Romanticism to Classicism had been gradual, confused and inconsistently pursued, so too the move from Classicism to Modernism had been fermenting for some years. Le Corbusier’s Vers Une Architecture35 was published in 1923 and, over the next two decades, moved from being a revolutionary manifesto to a bible for many Modern architects. Its images of an exciting new, clean, utilitarian, egalitarian modern world of ocean liners and aeroplanes were as seductive as they were challenging, and few young architects could resist the power of his propaganda. The same Paris Exhibition of Decorative Arts of 1925, which had so warmed to the Nordic pavilions, had also contained Le Corbusier’s Pavilion de l’Esprit Nouveau, which in contrast represented a complete break with the past and a glimpse of the future of architecture. ‘Architects had the same ideal goal as the political left: a world of reason, social justice, and material welfare, free from the weight of tradition. Le Corbusier, who became the leading utopian architect of his age expressed the idea in an effective slogan: Architecture or Revolution.’³⁶ By the mid-1920s, the first Functionalist buildings in Northern Europe were under construction, and the student who had outshone Gunnar Asplund in their year at the Stockholm University, Osvald Almqvist (1884–1950), can probably lay claim to completing the first Modern building in Scandinavia with his Hammarfors hydroelectric power station of 1925 in Northern Sweden.

This next generation of Scandinavian architects, including Sven Markelius (1889–1972), Arne Jacobsen (1902–1971) and Erik Bryggman (1891–1955), were visiting Germany, rather than Italy, to see the newly completed Functionalist buildings such as the new Bauhaus School in Dessau, where the first buildings were completed in 1926, and the Weissenhof Housing Exhibition in Stuttgart of 1927, which featured buildings by Mies van der Rhoe (1886–1969), Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Markelius managed to establish contact with Gropius during his visit and invited him to Stockholm, where the messianic Bauhaus director gave a lecture in March 1928. That year, Alvar Aalto, until then an increasingly well-regarded Nordic Classicist, visited Amsterdam and Paris to see Jan Duiker’s (1890–1935) Zonnestraal Sanatorium (1919–1928) and to meet Le Corbusier, who unfortunately was in Moscow at the time of Aalto’s visit. The first meeting of the CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne) took place on 26–28 June 1928 without any Scandinavian representation, but by 1929, both Aalto and Markelius attended the second meeting by invitation.37 That same year, Bryggman collaborated with Aalto on the design of the Turku Exhibition, which, though modest, became an early proclamation of Finnish Functionalism.

Meanwhile, Asplund continued working with Gregor Paulsson (1889–1977), who had been appointed as Director to oversee the development of the Swedish Exhibition in Stockholm, which was to take place in 1930. The architect and director travelled together to see both the Brno Exhibition of 1928 and the remaining buildings of the Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart. Beyond seeing Le Corbusier’s pavilion in Paris in 1925, this was Asplund’s first direct encounter with the Modern Movement and the early Functionalist buildings of Gropius and Mies van der Rohe. This experience appears to have influenced him profoundly. While his buildings had become more and more restrained throughout the 1920s, they were still all clearly Classical in organization and form – so this was no natural drift into Modernism but a revelation which would dramatically change Asplund’s approach and the course of Scandinavian architecture.

On his return to Stockholm, Asplund began work on the exhibition park and buildings with his team of collaborators which included Sigurd Lewerentz and Markelius. As their designs emerged, it became clear that a radically different architecture was under construction – exposed steel-framed buildings, whole walls of glazing, white rendered planes, coloured external blinds and giant graphics illuminated by searchlights; this was the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism absorbed, digested, distilled and reconstituted in Stockholm. What is unusual, in retrospect, is that the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and Asplund’s conversion to Modernism provided such a clear point of reference in the history of architecture. ‘In the 1920s, Asplund was the inspiring personality in the Nordic countries. Only those themselves who were part of the era could possibly fully understand what he meant at the time for Architecture in Scandinavia, how each new project by him was an event, and what a sensation his determined conversion to the so-called Functionalism involved.’³⁸ For the visitors to the exhibition, in the midst of another economic depression, it was a glimpse of a new, fresher, brighter, egalitarian world; for Asplund’s architectural contemporaries, it was both a route map to the future and the coup de grace for Nordic Classicism.

There have been many attempts by architectural historians to rationalize Asplund, Lewerentz and others – apparently Damascene conversion to Modernism. Colin St John Wilson, in true Modernist style, has suggested that their conversion was in response to the changes taking place in society and that ‘the old language could no longer take the strain’.³⁹ This view however wholly disregards Nordic Classicism’s considerable effectiveness up until 1930 in rising to numerous new architectural challenges, including social housing via public buildings to industrial installations with a considerable range of responses from the subtle and sensitive to the monumental. Other Modernists have suggested that the increasingly stripped-down aesthetic of Nordic Classicism led quite naturally to the minimalism of Modernism. Again, this is difficult to accept as Asplund, Kampmann, Sirén and others’ buildings of the 1920s were clearly Classical in form, detail and planning. I think as far as we can go is William JR Curtis’s position that ‘the search for elemental values in classicism and in the vernacular contributed to a formal simplification in Scandinavian architecture that supplied a foundation for eventual modernism’.40

So let us not be deluded into the suggestion that Nordic Classicism was part of some golden thread of Modern architectural history that linked the Arts and Crafts with Functionalism. Whether a backward look or not, Nordic Classicism was a Classical revival, which succeeded National Romanticism and which in turn was extinguished, itself, almost overnight, by International Modernism. The Nordic Classicists who converted to Modernism did not drift there naturally from Classicism but were instead seduced by printed images and the clean first white buildings of a future which they wanted to be part of – a future which represented a total break with the past, which was exciting, fresh, technologically advanced and which, they believed, would inexorably lead to a fairer society.

The impact of Asplund’s conversion on his and other architect’s drawing boards was immediate. Classical designs on which construction had yet to commence were Modernized, projects on site were rationalized and all competition entries were now Functionalist. For Asplund, his design for the extension to Gothenburg Law Courts, which he had won as a National Romantic competition entry in 1913, now moved from being a Classical building arranged around a Roman atrium to become his first completed Modern building when it opened in 1937. For Alvar Aalto, his obviously Classical Muramme Church was rather embarrassingly still under construction; this meant a major revision to his Classical competition-winning design for Viipuri Library of 1927. Out went the formal plan and full-height Roman frieze in the entrance hall and in came the steel glazed screens and the undulating acoustic ceiling of the fully-glazed meeting room, which finally opened to international acclaim in 1935. One by one, almost all of the practising Scandinavian architects were influenced and converted, either wholly or largely, and this brief Classical interlude in the architecture of the Nordic countries – which for most of the twentieth century was seen as an unfortunate disturbance in the neat and familiar story of the development of Modern Architecture – drew to its conclusion and sadly thus lost the potential grace, pathos and haunting visual appeal of further fine Nordic Classical buildings.

Fortunately, those which remain (and significantly, most remain in very effective use in our postmodern world) are highly regarded both by their users and by those who appreciate and visit architecture of the highest quality from around the world. They are cherished by the communities which they serve, have almost all been recently lovingly restored and continue to evoke and support the civilized society, which their architects sought to create.